An NYT reporter called media coverage of the January 6th, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol “overblown” and called out his colleagues’ response to the events of that day in a undercover journalism video released by Project Veritas.
Matthew Rosenberg, a national security correspondent for the New York Times, has extensively reported on the January 6th Capitol riot, and has accused former President Donald Trump and his supporters in right-wing media of using “a furious array of rumor, innuendo, partial facts and outright lies” to create “alternative narratives” that make excuses for the violent mob that trespassed at the Capitol Building.
But, in excerpts from a secretly recorded conversation with an “undercover journalist” from Project Veritas, Rosenberg admitted that the left has also spun a narrative, but in the opposite direction.
“It’s not a big deal as they are making it, because they were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t,” Rosenberg said in excerpts of the video, which were published on Tuesday, March 8th.
The NYT reporter also said that the left’s overreaction to January 6th gave conservatives an opportunity to downplay what happened.
Rosenberg said:
“The Left’s reaction to it in some places was so over the top that it gave the opening the Right needed to start introducing the idea of, ‘Whoa, these people are out of control. Like it’s not as big a deal as they’re making it.’ Cause [the Left] were making too big a deal. They were making [Jan. 6] some organized thing that it wasn’t. And that gave the opening for the lunatics in the Right to be like, ‘Oh, well, nothing happened here. It was just a peaceful bunch of tourists,’ you know, and it’s like, but nobody wants [to] hear that.”
He also made statements admitting that there were “a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”
Project Veritas did not disclose exactly when the undercover video was recorded, but the outlet’s founder and CEO James O’Keefe said that it was filmed around the same time that Rosenberg was working on an article entitled, “The Next Big Lies: Jan 6 was No Big Deal, or A Left-Wing Plot.”
The article was one of several features published by the New York Times in January for the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot.
In other clips from the video, Rosenberg called out some of his colleagues, saying that they acted like “f***ing b****es” when they claimed to have been traumatized by the violence on January 6th.
“I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the building, and they’re young and are like, ‘Oh my God, it was so scary,'” the NYT reporter said. “I’m like, ‘F*** off.'” He also said that “[the Times is] not the kind place I can tell somebody to man up, but I kind of want to be like, ‘Dude, come on, like, you were not in any danger.'”
