Richie McGinniss

Richie McGinniss is a former video director, semi-nonprofessional small wave surfer, and men’s league hockey scrapper. He graduated from Georgetown University without honors, majoring in Middle Eastern History and minoring in Arabic and Philosophy. McGinniss studied abroad in Amman, Jordan and traveled to Egypt's Tahrir Square in the months before the Arab Spring. He started his career in media with an internship at Al-Jazeera Arabic, at MSNBC/NBC News DC as a production assistant, then a freelance videographer and bartender—emphasis on the latter—before landing a job as a video editor for Conservative Radio Host Mark Levin’s new all-online show LevinTV.

In early 2017, McGinniss took a huge pay cut to take a new job running the ragtag video operation at an antiestablishment news website, Daily Caller (though the “respectable” media referred to the outlet as a tabloid or blog). As Paige Williams of The New Yorker wrote on McGinniss’ role at Daily Caller, “he took the job because it offered him the opportunity to run his own video unit and because he believed that ‘the special interests of corporate America’ have ‘led our media to forget about the common, individual American.’”

When the pandemic and subsequent civil unrest hit the shores of the U.S., McGinniss led a team of reporters through lawless zones across the country: DC, Seattle’s “CHAZ,” Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, Wauwatosa, the southern border, and Philadelphia, then back to DC for the 2020 election, Stop the Steal I, II, and III. His lifetime of surfing around the world and scrumming it in the corner on the ice came in handy when he embedded with and interviewed protesters/rioters of all creeds, all while enduring police beatings. Covering riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, McGinniss witnessed Kyle Rittenhouse kill Joseph Rosenbaum, then testified as a key witness (and named victim) in the trial. Also recording the Capitol riot on January 6th, McGinniss has a firsthand understanding of how news events can be cannibalized and refashioned by the media. After 16 years he is still stuck in Washington, DC.