Tanya Mosley

not all blood leads.

It's a specific blood, specific bodies.

And the Post was loud and visceral and specific about its heroes and villains.

And as you said, it was very much racialized.

How did that style of coverage really migrate from a New York tabloid to local news across the country and eventually to Fox News?

They had these screwdrivers because they were going to use them to open up those machines.

You mentioned something about Goethe speaking about Rittenhouse.

Does he get called into news shows to this day to discuss things that happen?

There's this media vocabulary that you trace that really kicks in the moment a story like this breaks.

I mean, there are many of them, but the white shooter may be a vigilante or, in Rittenhouse's case, a scared kid when he went to Wisconsin during the protests after George Floyd's murder.

A scared kid who was in over its head.

For black people, especially black victims, there is always an interrogation of who they were that...

tries to give justification for why they were targeted.

A thug.

He was no angel.

He had a record.

It's almost automatic.

What was it like for you to go back through those archives, the headlines, and as part of your research, did you go into it really understanding and knowing this, or were you surprised by just the clarity of that pattern?

Let's take a short break.

If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Heather Ann Thompson about her book, Fear and Fury.