Did a CNN Correspondent Actually Defend BLM Attacking His Own Crew?

Last week, Black Lives Matter protesters attacked a CNN crew, and yet, the network didn’t find it newsworthy at all.

Protesters just chased the entire CNN crew away from the police precinct. pic.twitter.com/r6TGmnBxIH

— Nic Rowan (@NicXTempore) April 15, 2021

On Monday, CNN finally mentioned the incident, but Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter actually scoffed at how the incident went “viral” and mocked the idea that CNN had been covering up.

“There was video shared on Twitter of a water bottle being thrown at your crew on one occasion,” Stelter said to CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez. “This seems like protesters trying to create trouble. This was a story that went viral in right-wing media. Frankly, they claimed that CNN was covering it up, which is ridiculous.”

Marquez then described the incident in more detail. “We even moved because some protesters didn’t want to be on camera so we moved to accommodate them. And then another smaller group of protesters came around and started sort of shouting us down. They had a loudspeaker, they were trying to shout us down. They wanted us to move to a place where we couldn’t see the protesters that were taunting the police,” he explained.

“And that’s when this water bottle gets thrown at one of our guys. He stumbled back, fell over — tripped over a curb, but it heightened everything at that point. We started trying to figure out how to make an exit because it was just getting too intense there. But we didn’t want to look like we were running. That’s when somebody hit me with a water bottle. And then we sort of started moving toward our cars.”

“They continued to sort of pelt us with whatever they could find. We got in the car and we took off,” he added.

Think Marquez had anything bad to say about these protesters who attacked him and his crew? Pfftt… apparently not.

“I cannot blame them for being angry,” Marquez said. “But, you know, a lot of people are very angry, suspicious of the press, the corporate media, all of those things come into it at these places. And it was just one of those situations that – it was intense, there were people who were angry at everything and everybody and we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”