Scott Jennings Faces Legal Threat From Twitch Streamer
Salem Media Conservative commentator Scott Jennings is facing a legal threat over a bogus racism claim made against a popular left-wing streamer.
During his nationally syndicated radio show last Tuesday, Jennings, 48, aired a compilation of clips from Twitch influencer Hasan Piker, during a segment he called an “exploration of the radical socialist streamer.” Piker, 35, has over 3 million followers on Twitch, and live-streams on the platform for up to eight hours each day.
After playing the spliced-together clips, Jennings said, “Now [Abdul] El-Sayed’s best friend is out there calling for Black voters to be lynched”—referring to the Michigan Democratic Senate nominee.
“Beneath all the smiles and dancing videos, there’s nothing but hate and violence in the heart of these communists,” Jennings added.
Jennings, who is also regularly on CNN and has been talked of as the potential new White House press secretary, posted the clip on his radio show’s social media channel, saying “Here [sic] him in his OWN WORDS.” On Aug.
11, Jennings also shared a video where Piker appears to say “I don’t give a f--- what Black people care about,” and mentions going “back to a better time when lynchings were happening.” But an investigation by Snopes found that the video Jennings shared, including the derogatory remarks about Black people and him claiming he wishes the U.S. would return to a time of lynchings, is “heavily edited and presents Piker’s spoken words without full context, and in some cases out of order.” “As such, it is misleading,” Snopes found.
Snopes found that videos had fragments of Piker’s words “stitched together out of context and out of order to twist their original import.” They added, “A full review of Piker’s unedited remarks confirms Jennings falsely claimed Piker said he was in favor of bringing back lynchings.
In the original stream , Piker’s remarks on lynchings were sarcastic reactions to a user’s chat comment and opinions expressed by someone else in a separate video.” Piker is now planning legal action over what he considers to be defamatory comments, according to Status , saying the filing “seems unavoidable.” “This kind of defamation is completely unacceptable,” Piker told Status.
“It’s exactly how normal people perceive mainstream media to operate, and it’s a real crisis of credibility.
I think someone has to push back against it at some point.” The Daily Beast has contacted reps for Piker and Jennings for comment.
Piker noted that the viral clips, taken from his lengthy Twitch streams, have become increasingly “deceptive” and have been deliberately stripped of their original context.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.thedailybeast.com — the content belongs to The Daily Beast.