WaPo, Margaret Sullivan:
Right-wing extremists committed 74 percent of the 372 politically motivated murders recorded in the United States between 2007 and 2016. Left-wing extremists committed less than 2 percent.
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But it’s safe to say that most news consumers, if they know anything about antifa, know what the president has told them, and what they’ve gleaned from the club-wielding protesters shown endlessly on TV: that it’s roughly the left-wing equivalent of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
That’s not only untrue, but it has the effect of tarring everyone who protests Trump, as well as those who peacefully march for climate-change awareness or rally against hate-mongering speakers such as Milo Yiannopoulos, the onetime Breitbart provocateur.
The best thing journalists can do is to relentlessly explain the beliefs, scope and scale of antifa, and to resist conflating it with liberal groups. And most important, to challenge politically motivated efforts to create a false equivalency between antifa and the rising tide of white supremacy. There is no comparison.
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