Riot Diet with RIchie McGinniss

In Between The Pages with James Lott Jr.

Growing up in Connecticut and Long Island, New York, McGinniss studied Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Georgetown University and traveled to Jordan, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt’s Tahrir Square less than a month before it became the flashpoint for the widespread protests and revolutions that erupted during the Arab Spring.
McGinniss next worked at the Al-Jazeera program “Min Washington,” broadcasting to households in Arabic throughout the Middle East, at NBC News’s Washington Bureau as a production assistant, and as the video director at Daily Caller, where he built a team of ten video producers.
While covering the demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin, sparked by the police shooting of a black man named Jacob Blake, McGinniss witnessed Kyle Rittenhouse shoot Joseph Rosenbaum and nearly got shot himself when a bullet ricocheted near his foot. McGinniss was plunged into the national spotlight and was praised for his clear, non-biased reporting of the violence. As The New Yorker observed in its trial coverage, “when McGinniss testified, he strove to be as assiduously neutral about the shooting as he had been in interviews with me and with others.”
After his appearance on Tucker Carlson was taken out of context by CNN, McGinniss’s straightforward appearance not only corrected the record, it also showed how one person can compel a news corporation to diverge from preset talking points and relay to the public the truth behind a shooting that will go down in history as the peak of 2020’s unrest.
But McGinniss soon found himself a political lightning rod. Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters initially celebrated McGinniss for not vilifying Rittenhouse and merely reporting what he saw. During the trial, his role as a named victim put him in the crosshairs of the political right. After Rittenhouse’s acquittal on murder charges, McGinniss felt the wrath of Black Lives Matters supporters and others. “I was really the friend of nobody,” he says.