In response to the jury verdict finding Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of murder, journalists and leading Democrats peddled the false claim that Jacob Blake is dead and was unarmed. Jacob Blake is alive and had a knife. He was shot by a policeman because he had a knife, refused to drop it, and a woman he’d sexually assaulted had called the police asking for help. But the shooting didn’t kill him. Journalists and Democrats also peddled the false claim that Rittenhouse killed two or three black people, when in fact Rittenhouse killed two white men and no black people in what appears to have been self-defense.
As John Sexton notes at Hot Air, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Sean Patrick Maloney released the following statement after Kyle Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all charges: “It’s disgusting and disturbing that someone was able to carry a loaded assault rifle into a protest against the unjust killing of Jacob Blake, an unarmed black man, and take the lives of two people and injure another — and face absolutely no consequences.”
As John Sexton notes, there are “Two very basic errors in” Maloney’s “first sentence. Jacob Blake isn’t dead and, by his own admission, he wasn’t unarmed….how do you make a mistake like that in the first place? The best you can say is that the DCCC wasn’t alone. The same mistake got made last night on ESPN.” “NBC Sports” also “published this false claim yesterday. It’s still up and not corrected as I write this. Yahoo News made the same claim.” Likewise, “ABC News’ Terry Moran yesterday” was “talking about the ‘police killing’ of Jacob Blake,” which never occurred, as you can see from this video.
MSNBC erroneously referred to the “late Jacob Blake,” and earlier, Maya Wiley talked on MSNBC about Jacob Blake being killed by police as the context in which the Rittenhouse shootings supposedly happened. In a video, Maya Wiley “states that the police killed Jacob Blake. That must be news to the very much alive Jacob Blake,” notes Sexton.
Newspapers like the Daily Mail also mistakenly referred to Jacob Blake as being dead. And CNN’s Anderson Cooper reportedly referred to Jacob Blake’s death on air yesterday.
Similarly, progressive school officials wrongly referred to Blake being dead in notices to students in response to the verdict, offering them safe spaces “to process the not guilty verdict.”Fitchburg State University claimed that police were responsible for the “wrongful death of Jacob Blake” in 2020.
Newspapers in many countries have falsely reported that the people shot by Rittenhouse were black, including newspapers in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the Netherlands. For example, The Independent wrote “Full Story: Teenager who shot three black men with rifle found not guilty on all charges…Republican politicians celebrate as jury acquits Kenosha shooter.” Brazil’s biggest newspaper made the same mistake. Israeli media also reported that Rittenhouse killed black people. A Dutch news service falsely claimed that Rittenhouse killed two black people.
