Yes, but what they don’t realize is that once they get “their people” in power, the rioters and the media will the next target for the purge. Rulers don’t want negative media or counter revolutions.
The media is participating in their own demise.
One other irony: when leftist dictatorships come to power, the first people they purge are the idealistic activist types who are "true believers" in the ideology. Once in power, dictators have to actually govern and maintain a semblance of order, and college campus protesters with poor hygiene don't help them do so. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro regarded their own equivalents of today's Antifa as useful idiots - helpful in overthrowing the old order and bringing them to power, but only good for lining up in front of a firing squad afterwards.