Rittenhouse trial witness pens column condemning media ‘caricatures’ of Rittenhouse and those killed

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Tucker Carlson speaks to Kyle Rittenhouse about Kenosha shootings

'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host speaks to the teenager about the events that led to his homicide trial.

D.C.-based video director, and witness at the self-defense trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, Richie McGinnis slammed the media for making Rittenhouse and those killed in the shooting into "caricatures of the people they really were."

In a column for Newsweek, McGinniss slammed both conservative and liberal media for how they portrayed these individuals for their own gain, and also accused "media chieftains" of encouraging the "violence" that occurred that night in Kenosha. 

Published on Thursday, the two-year anniversary of the Kenosha, Wisconsin riots, McGinniss' piece detailed what he saw as a Daily Caller reporter covering the riot, specifically the moments in which Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and injured one in self-defense.

Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges related to the deaths of two men and injury of a third that night. The jury found that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.

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A Newsweek column penned by Kenosha riot and Rittenhouse trial witness condemned the media treatment of Rittenhouse, the men he killed in self-defense, and the violence in Kenosha.   (Sean Krajacic/The Kenosha News via AP, Pool_File)

The point of McGinniss’ piece was to chip away at what he called the "caricatures and tall tales the media made up about the shooting and its central characters so that the media "algorithm" could generate maximum media buzz. 

Titled, "I Was in Kenosha Two Years Ago, Kyle Rittenhouse Is Not a Hero," the piece opened by giving McGinnis’ firsthand account the carnage that ensued once the "17-year-old kid with a semi-automatic rifle" was threatened by rioters. 

After interviewing Rittenhouse, who told him "People are getting injured, and our job is to protect this business, and part of my job is also to help people," McGinniss recalled, "Thirteen minutes later, Rittenhouse, standing feet from me, would kill one man. A few minutes after that, he'd kill another. Then he'd maim a third."

Describing how he cradled one of the men killed in the shooting, Joseph Rosenbaum, he wrote, "I took off the Black Lives Matter t-shirt I chose that night to blend in with the crowd and used it to stanch the wounds on the first shooting victim: Joseph Rosenbaum." The author described the scene at the hospital where the other of Rittenhouse’s attackers were brought. 

"As we pulled up to the hospital, I watched Gaige Grosskreutz limp through its doors. A police officer held his butchered arm. It was a mangled mass of flesh and bone, not fully amputated, but not quite an arm. I didn't know it at the time, but Anthony Huber was lying dead on the pavement just outside the hospital," he stated.

McGinniss then slammed the media for using and manipulating this tragic scene for its own gain. "All four of them—Rittenhouse and the three men he'd shot—were about to be manufactured by the media machine into caricatures of the people they really were," he wrote.

Pointing the finger at both conservative and liberal media’s spin about Rosenbaum specifically, he claimed, "In the months after the Rittenhouse shooting, most mainstream reporters and producers immortalized Rosenbaum as a Black Lives Matter martyr, even though he'd been caught on camera earlier that day using the n-word. Conservatives called him a ‘pedo’—he'd been convicted of having sex with a minor, in 2002—who'd had it coming."
 

Richie McGinniss, Rittenhouse trial witness, claimed the media made "caricatures" of Rittenhouse and his victims for buzz. 

"Meanwhile, to his detractors, Rittenhouse was a white-supremacist vigilante, and, to his lionizers, a hero standing up for law and order," McGinniss continued, adding, "The left ignored the fact that Rittenhouse had come out that day to clean graffiti. Conservatives, champions of family values, didn't bother to ask why Rittenhouse's family had allowed him to venture out onto the streets of Kenosha, in the middle of violent demonstrations, in the first place."

The author further disparaged conservative media’s lionization of Rittenhouse, stating, "Nor did they care that he'd lied about being a medic. Nor did they seem to mind that their hero, instead of calling 911, as I'd asked him to do after he shot Rosenbaum, had fled on foot."

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He summed it up, saying, "These cartoonish characterizations were just that—cartoons designed for the algorithm. Everyone and everything was spun through these partisan lenses without regard to contradiction or nuance."

After giving a brief account of his testimony at Rittenhouse’s 2021 trial, McGinniss recalled how the media encouraged this "violence." He wrote, "It's also easy to forget that the violence was part of a national tsunami that was encouraged, if not outright stoked, by media chieftains in Washington and New York. Kyle Rittenhouse was broadly presented as either a force for good or evil. In my view, he was neither."

"This was calamitous for Kenosha. And, above all, for Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz. And, in a way, for Kyle Rittenhouse, who remains confined to his media cartoon forever," McGinniss added.  

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Kenosha County Sherriff and police officers in riot gear form a line behind a burning truck during demonstrations against the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin on August 24, 2020. - Police faced off with hundreds of peaceful protesters ahead of a curfew in this city in Wisconsin Monday, as rage grew once more in the US at the shooting of a black man by a white officer (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)