I do not understand how people believe this. News clip after news clip shows a CNN or FOX or MSNBC anchor in front of buildings that are literally on fire and they're saying "This is a protest ... it's mostly peaceful."

It's like we're watching the same exact movie and yet we're seeing two totally different films.

Purely peaceful doesn't tend to make the news. There were many thousands of rallies overall, with millions of attendees. If a tiny part of those has even just a few dozen shitheads max, you both got truly "mostly peaceful" and enough unacceptably bad stuff to produce enough news reports to make people think the country is burning. Some media have attempted to quantify it later based on police reports, and from what I remember it mostly matches that model.

The "based on police reports" is also a false narrative

They are using a % of attendee's to come up with that, so if a "protest" was attended by 1,000 and only 10 people were arrested it was billed as "mostly peaceful" even though looting, fires, etc occurred.

It is a changing of the definition of what most reasonable people would consider a "peaceful protest"

> They are using a % of attendee's to come up with that,

no, reporting that says "1% of rallies had X reported" is not using a percentage of attendees.

And if seen myself at protests (not in the US/at BLM, to be clear) how much damage a dozen shitheads out of a few thousand attendees sadly can cause, and I would still qualify those as mostly peaceful (as did the authorities). This is in no way an excuse for those rioting, but it is for, you know, the vast majority of peaceful attendants (who in an escalating situation quite often are forced to stay, even if they don't want to)

So your response hinges on a single news outlet calling it riots and that is to represent all of the media?