This is the story of a former MSNBC and Fox News personality — no, not the Swanson Frozen Foods heir who’s a stone cold racist and apologist for the Kremlin, but a bona fide former Emmy winner. It’s also the story of a former warehouse worker turned YouTube personality, some guys pulling a stunt in Southern California, and how seemingly competent people can be willing marks for grifters.
David Shuster has worked in TV journalism since around 1990, starting in local news and winning a regional Emmy early on for a story on a housing scandal. He worked at early Fox News, then MSNBC, and later at the short-lived Current network (where he was hired to be substitute anchor for Keith Olbermann’s revival of “Countdown” there) and Al Jazeera America. He currently hosts videos on a YouTube channel, RebelHQ, that is part of the Young Turks network of progressive YouTube channels.
It’s clear from his content that Shuster is rightfully concerned with issues surrounding police misconduct. Stemming from this, Shuster has become huge fan of a YouTube phenomenon called “auditing”, and one major figure in the “auditing” subculture in particular.
“Auditing” usually consists of someone with a YouTube channel, a smartphone and a gimbal going to a public space and filming people, either public employees (usually clerks, librarians and postal workers) or others in public places, usually generating confrontations that to detractors play out like low grade reality TV. Because of this, detractors refer to the practice as “frauditing”, though fans typically see this as a legitimate form of free speech and even “sticking it to the Man”. It’s not hard to see which side of this Shuster comes down on.
In a baritone worthy of a wedding reception DJ and sounding somewhat like “Humpty” from the 90s hip hop group Digital Underground,, Shuster’s favorite “auditor”, Long Island Audit (real name: Sean Paul Reyes) announces to his viewers that “we’re here to see if they will respect our constitutional rights” before entering a public building and usually generating a confrontation with clerks or other public employees who don’t want to be filmed. While he tends to portray himself as more civil than some of his peers, LIA tends to provoke confrontation and the occasional arrest. In this video, LIA tells corrections workers in upstate New York — almost certainly falsely - that he’s working on a story about a prison break that happened there a few years earlier. At the end, Shuster offers “Kudos to Sean Paul Reyes for his tireless First Amendment efforts”.
Of course, Reyes/LIA is profiting heavily from all this, while demonstrating a not very good layman’s understanding of even the one facet of First Amendment law he’s basing his act off of. Reyes, a former warehouse worker, focuses on one area of 1A law, the alleged “right to film in public”, though it’s without nuance. His videos don’t differentiate between barging into a public building with a gimbal and a camera and incidental filming as famously happened in the George Floyd case, and they don’t address clear cases where building administrators can regulate conduct within their buildings, as the USPS does. Reyes’s YouTube channel offers paid memberships and merch — get your “We the People” caps and t-shirts, kids!
Reyes’s videos have had a prominent place on Shuster’s YouTube channel and Twitter feed, and who knows, maybe he sees himself as Watson to Reyes’s Sherlock, or kind of a bromance version of Lois Lane to Reyes’s Superman. It’s almost laughable, but that’s not the worst of it.
One of the more confrontational figures in the audit world is one called “SGV News” (real name Shawn Doula, and many frauditors operate with channel names that include either “News” or “News Now”), who operates out of San Diego. In the following video, SGV News provokes a confrontation on a sidewalk while acting like a stereotypical Islamist militant on a sidewalk in front of a welding company. Speaking faux Arabic and alternating “Alllahu akbar” with “bullshit” and “motherfucker”, this is a pure, straight up racist display:
At 8:52 in the video, Shuster — a man who once worked for Al Jazeera America, an Arab owned news outfit — offers the following:
Kudos to Shawn Doula with SGV News for delivering a creative and unique way to educate police.
Let’s get this straight: a former cable news guy — a guy who won an Emmy near the beginning of his career and later worked with a short-lived though high quality news outfit that was owned by Arabs — is cool with a blatantly racist act playing off Arab stereotypes so long as it fits his narrative. He seems even to get mildly amused over it.
Shuster’s career trajectory — from local news to bouncing around cable outfits, including a couple of short-lived ones, and then to a niche YouTube channel — probably isn’t that uncommon. And while Shuster is a guy who no longer toils in the more widely consumed field that is cable or even local news, we’ve seen others from all sides of the ideological spectrum be willing to buy into nonsense so long as it fits a narrative. It happened with the Washington Post and the New York Times in the aftermath of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq (Judith Miller, anybody?) and now with the Times seeking balance in any number of Iowa diners.
Sadly, David Shuster isn’t the only one out there who could embrace nonsense, grifters and ugly displays in the name of pushing the storyline. Sadly, some of them are working at bigger and more prominent outlets than a YouTube channel.