Privileging A Republican Lie
The Media Research Center cheered when J.D. Vance spread the lie that Haitian migrants were eating pets in an Ohio town -- then falsely portrayed a would-be shooter of Donald Trump as a Democrat.
One of the odder episodes of the 2024 presidential campaign was Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance bleating about Haitian migrants eating pets in an Ohio town. It wasn’t true — but the Media Research Center gave Vance a pass anyway. Jorge Bonilla spent a Sept. 11 post being angry that Vance’s lies were called out:
U.S. Senator and GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance went into the post-debate spin room and exposed the media’s omissive biases when covering the effects of the border disaster in small towns like Springfield, Ohio. It took cat memes to get the media to look at the story.
Watch as Vance calls out the media’s general disinterest in what happened in a small town until it was time to firefight a story on behalf of the Regime (click “expand” to view full transcript):
[…]
Immigration had its moment in this debate, and the conversation did turn to Springfield, Ohio. And the fact is that the plight of this small town did not burst on to the national consciousness until the cat (and waterfowl) memes began circulating on X and other social media.
In this case, the media followed a familiar pattern: ignore a story that is inconvenient or embarrassing to the Regime until it can be turned against conservatives. The insertion of roughly 20,000 unassimilated migrants into a town of about 50,000 is a recipe for upheaval. Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration did the inserting, so this story is not convenient to cover in its face.
And it wasn’t until videos of contentious town halls began circulating, and people began amplifying these stories on social media, that the media began firefighting the story and questioning whether any of this is really happening.
And this is the point that Vance drives home to Collins. Nobody cared about Springfield until the cat memes started circulating. And even now, the Regime Media remains uninterested in this story except to firefight it. Rather than do journalism and investigate fully. Vance is proven right.
Bonilla is deliberately omitting the crucial point that all of this was a lie. Haitian immigrants were not eating people’s pets, they are not illegal immigrants — in fact, local officials encouraged them to come — and the rate of communicable diseases has not increased as Vance claimed. But Bonilla would rather embrace a lie that advances his partisan political agenda than facts that don’t, then try to dismiss the lies as nothing but “cat memes.”
The same day, Mark Finkelstein similarly refused to admit the pet-eating story was a lie, instead whining that Donald Trump was busted for claiming it during a debate:
If it had been up to Kasie Hunt, host of CNN This Morning, the rest of today’s show could have been ditched, replaced by a non-stop loop of Trump making his claim, during last night’s debate, that migrants are eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio.
She cited leftist late-night jester Stephen Colbert, and smirked at Trump “spouting baseless allegations about migrants eating pets.” After playing it once, Hunt begged a show director:
“Can we, can we just, Jimmy in the control room, can we play the pets bite one more time? Can we just watch that one more time?”
Sadly for Kasie, Jimmy didn’t have the bit cued up. Instead, they moved to a clip of a CNN post-debate focus group in Erie, Pennsylvania of supposedly undecided voters. Hunt said “we do have sound of undecided voters talking about this pet-eating conspiracy.”
Bonilla still refused to admit the lie in another post that day:
During his post-debate spin room interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Ohio Senator and GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance made the point that the Regime Media had zero interest in what was going on in Ohio until cat memes began popping up on social media. It took less than 24 hours for Vance to be proven right, with NBC and CBS rushing to firefight the stories coming out of Springfield, Ohio.
[…]
The thing is: none of these reports ever showed an on-air interaction with a city official. None of these reports ever mentioned or displayed the various public meetings where these concerns were originally aired by local residents. Both NBC and CBS simply expect their viewers to accept at face value that these claims are without merit.
Each of these reports, filed by Yamiche Alcindor and Lilia Luciano, respectively, then pivot away from the various crises affecting Springfield as a direct result of Biden-Harris immigration policies. That is why this is such a firefight.
There was no incentive for Regime Media to report on what is happening at Springfield until there appeared a way for the story to be made into a Trump-negative story. And the media didn’t get that incentive until Trump uttered “dogs and cats” at the presidential debate. The media wouldn’t have found out about Springfield except for the emergence of memes of cats and ducks urging Trump to save them.
By jumping so quickly into the Springfield story, JD Vance was proven right.
Again: Bonilla is cheerleading a lie because it helps his narratives. Indeed, though he is whining that that we aren’t supposed to trust city officials who point out it’s a lie, Bonilla gives us no reason to trust random people making inflammatory, evidence-free claims.
Curtis Houck whined that a CBS show had on “two liberals melting down over Trump talking about Haitian immigrants overrunning Springfield, Ohio” — but wouldn’t admit Trump was lying.
Clay Waters lashed out at a PBS show talking about it, huffing that had on “hard-left academic extremist-hunter Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who understood the assignment.” Miller-Idriss pointed out that this was all about manufacturing “a threat from the other, from immigrants, from people of color to the nation, to white families, to civilization itself” — which Waters didn’t rebut.
In a Sept. 15 post, Bonilla was still refusing to admit Vance was lying even as he once again praised those lies for advancing his preferred narratives:
GOP vice presidential nominee and Ohio Senator JD Vance went on the Regime Media’s Sunday public affairs shows and utterly dismantled them for their lack of coverage of the stress that the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies have placed upon such towns as Springfield, Ohio, until a Trump-adverse angle can be exploited.
Watch as Vance exposes the practice during a fiery interview with CNN’s Dana Bash[.] […]
Bash tried to accuse Vance of making up stuff, to which he clarified that he and Trump created the media’s focus on Springfield by echoing the concerns of his constituents. This exchange is particularly ironic, given the Regime Media’s role in advancing all manner of fabrications from the left, with zero fact-check or context provided. There is no way to sufficiently pause the time and space continuum so as to be able to compile an exhaustive list. However, a more recent curation would include the media’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story until Joe Biden magically produced a letter signed by 51 former intel officers calling it Russian disinformation, as well as the media’s furtherance of such hoaxes as “Very Fine People”, “Bloodbath”, and “Suckers and Losers”.
Once more, Bonilla is privileging Vance’s lie for partisan reasons. Instead, he praised the lie once more:
The American media, intent on suppressing or otherwise omitting stories unfavorable to the Regime, has steadfastly refused to cover the effects of the current administration’s border policies across America. Whether we are talking about migrants violently taking over apartment complexes in Colorado, raping and murdering girls in Texas, criming in New York City, or straining small towns such as Springfield.
Bonilla provided no evidence that the Haitian immigrants were “straining” Springfield.
Tim Graham took his own turn at complaining that Trump’s and Vance’s lies were called out:
The badly disguised Democrats at PBS are having a hard time with this second assassination attempt on Donald Trump. They barely passed over it on Sunday night, and on Monday night, News Hour anchor Amna Nawaz and NPR reporter Tamara Keith savaged Trump-Vance again for demonizing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Curtis Houck pointed out on Sunday night that it was a 30-second news brief, followed by more Springfield bashing of Trump-Vance. I’m guessing the PBS News Weekend shows are pre-produced during the week and are not to be disturbed. So you get 30 seconds in the “News Wrap” on an assassination attempt, and eight minutes on celebrity endorsements of presidential candidates.
Graham huffed that CNN’s Bash “fact-checked Vance like she was Linsey Davis on the claims of pet-eating, just like all Democrats want them to do, incessantly.” He refused to admit that the fact-check was correct and showed that Vance was lying.
Would-be Trump shooter in the mix
When people cited Vance’s lie as a part of the toxic rhetoric that could be blamed in an man attempting to shoot Donald Trump, the MRC doubled down on defending the lie. Bonilla dismissed it as merely “rhetoric” in a Sept. 15 post:
As we exposed earlier, the Regime Media have wasted no time in blaming former President Donald Trump’s “rhetoric” for the second assassination attempt against him. The evening newscasts have now picked up MSNBC’s lead, tying the attempted shooting to the “dogs and cats rhetoric coming out of Springfield, Ohio.
Watch as Linsey Davis, in her return to the Whirled News Tonight anchor chair since her horrendous moderation of the ABC presidential debate, ties the aborted assassination attempt to Springfield in her opening rundown:
[…]
After downplaying the assassination attempt in her opening rundown as a “threat against the former president”, Davis goes on to properly report it as what it is. The rhetorical link here is implicit.
NBC’s Lester Holt goes a step further, directly tying the failed shooting attempt to Springfield:
[…]
NBC and the Regime Media waste no time in imputing the shooting to “rhetoric” and attempting to blame Trump for the latest, albeit failed, attempt on his life. Once the shooter’s motives become clear, how soon before the Regime Media retract? If they ever do at all?
But it wasn’t “rhetoric” — it was a out-and-out lie, one that Bonilla endorsed for partisan political reasons.
Curtis Houck similarly whined about the linkage:
On Monday, CBS Mornings ghoulishly placed the second Trump assassination attempt in two months alongside the former President’s “incendiary rhetoric” triggering “threats of violence” in Springfield, Ohio and against Haitian immigrants.
This disgusting attempt to muddy the waters and minimizing those wanting to kill Trump was seen hours earlier as ABC and NBC willingly chose to make this disgusting connection on Sunday’s World News Tonight (helmed by debate co-moderator Linsey Davis) and NBC Nightly News (with Lester Holt making a rare weekend evening appearance). Thankfully, Monday’s Good Morning America and Today didn’t make the same choice.
CBS co-host and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King downplayed the threat in the show’s “Eye Opener” teases: “A man is in custody after what looks like another assassination attempt on former President Trump. We have the latest on the investigation.”
Seconds later, co-host and former NFL player Nate Burleson pivoted to Springfield: “There are growing fears of racially motivated violence in Ohio due to Trump’s false claims about immigrants.”
[…]
Fill-in co-host Kristine Johnson pivoted from Trump being nearly killed to ripping his “inflammatory rhetoric” being responsible for “more threats of violence in Springfield, Ohio.”
“The city has seen multiple bomb threats against city hall and local schools after false claims from former President Trump and his running mate about immigrants eating pets. Now, they deny stoking racial hatred for political gain,” she added.
Congressional correspondent Nikole Killion announced from Springfield her disgust with Trump and running mate/Senator JD Vance (R-OH) for “doubl[ing] down on these disproven claims about Haitian immigrants here in Springfield” and fretted the mayor “feels like [the town is] caught in a political vortex.”
“This normally quiet town of roughly 60,000 residents still on edge since false claims about Haitian immigrants started online and were amplified by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance,” she continued, adding that “[t]he Proud Boys were seen marching through the streets over the weekend and a branch of the Ku Klux Klan spread leaflets with hateful messages.”
Killion later said “Vance condemned the threats of violence,” but dismissed them because “he continued to defend the false claims.”
Houck refused to explicitly admit that Vance was lying.
Nicholas Fondacaro tried to distance Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric (and lies) from the cycle of political violence with the help of a Republican governor:
As for CNN’s repeated suggestions that Trump’s rhetoric at the debate lead to the bomb threats [in Springfield] that turned out to be false too. Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine held a press conference on Monday and explained that the threats came from outside the United States and they were all hoaxes. “33 threats, 33 hoax,” he said. “We have people, unfortunately, overseas who are taking these actions.'”
Neither DeWine nor Fondacaro offered evidence that the people being threatened knew they were hoaxes at the time of the threat.
Graham groused in his Sept. 16 podcast (bolding in original):
The foiled second assassination attempt on Donald Trump wasn’t uniformly treated as a serious security problem. We found major networks blaming Trump’s hot talk on migrants and pets for his own assassins. They blamed him for not toning rhetoric down — the flagrantly hostile networks!
Curtis Houck explains how Sunday unfolded. NBC’s Lester Holt made a rare Sunday appearance: “Today’s apparent assassination attempt comes amid increasingly fierce rhetoric on the campaign trail itself. Mr. Trump, his running mate JD Vance continue to make baseless claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. This weekend, there were new bomb threats in that town.”
On ABC, Sunday anchor (and Kamala debate coddler) Linsey Davis opened the show with the Trump news, followed with this: “Springfield, Ohio on edge. Local schools are being threatened with violence and a college shuts down activities after threats were made following the baseless rumors that Asian immigrants have been eating pets.” Curtis suggested these threats could be from outside the country. After the taping, Gov. Mike DeWine announced all the threats were hoaxes and came from abroad.
Is Graham repeatedly bolding “baseless” because he’s tacitly admitting Vance’s claims are lies? Or is he suggesting that there is actual evidence behind them (despite nobody else having offered any)?
Bonilla came back to whine yet again:
With the aftermath of the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump drawing significant coverage, the Springfield “dogs and cats” story is beginning to recede from view- except on CBS, which chose to flog the story for at least one more night.
Watch CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell’s absolutely bonkers open to the Springfield item filed by correspondent Nikole Killion:
[…]
NBC’s Lester Holt did the same exact thing yesterday- the forced and accusatory tying in of Springfield with the most recent assassination attempt. For all the media’s denunciations of “inflammatory rhetoric”, they sure are good at cooking up some incitement of their own.
Killion’s report is a rehash of the common themes echoed in Springfield coverage, but with a reduced emphasis on actual cats and dogs. There was time to replay some JD Vance video from Sunday, and there was time to ask a restaurant manager about prank calls asking whether they serve cats. On plates.
Bonilla appended a tweet of his in which he ranted: “BURYING THE LEDE DEEP INTO THE EARTH’S CRUST: The matter of the Springfield bomb threats being FOREIGN HOAXES is buried at the end of CBS’s report- the only network evening newscast still milking…errrr…covering Springfield.” Again, the targets of the threats didn’t know they were hoaxes — and Bonilla refused to admit that the actual hoax was the Springfield story itself.
Graham returned to whine as well:
The badly disguised Democrats at PBS are having a hard time with this second assassination attempt on Donald Trump. They barely passed over it on Sunday night, and on Monday night, News Hour anchor Amna Nawaz and NPR reporter Tamara Keith savaged Trump-Vance again for demonizing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
Curtis Houck pointed out on Sunday night that it was a 30-second news brief, followed by more Springfield bashing of Trump-Vance. I’m guessing the PBS News Weekend shows are pre-produced during the week and are not to be disturbed. So you get 30 seconds in the “News Wrap” on an assassination attempt, and eight minutes on celebrity endorsements of presidential candidates.
[…]
On Monday night’s News Hour, anchor Amna Nawaz spent a short time expressing surprise that no one’s really slowing down or toning down after this assassination attempt, and then turned again to whipping on Vance, using his feisty interview on CNN with Dana Bash: “Meanwhile, speaking of political rhetoric, we should point out that the vice presidential candidate on the Republican side, J.D. Vance, continues to repeat baseless claims about the Haitian immigrant population in Ohio.”
Bash fact-checked Vance like she was Linsey Davis on the claims of pet-eating, just like all Democrats want them to do, incessantly.
Graham didn’t explain why Vance shouldn’t be called out for spreading a lie. Instead, he nonsensically groused that fact-checking is “reliable DNC messaging.” And he still refused to explictly admit that the Haitians-eating-pets story is a lie.
Bonilla served up one more fit of deceptive rage:
Just 48 hours after the second attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, the Regime Media are back to leveraging the rhetoric regarding Springfield, Ohio: this time, as a whatabout device with which to justify future insightful rhetoric against Trump.
Watch as CBS News, in an item filed by correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns, posits a weird tu quoque when discussing campaign rhetoric:
[…]
Note that Burns mentions the bomb threats without ever mentioning that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine disclosed them to be hoaxes originating from a hostile country to be disclosed later.
Note that Bonilla forgot to mention that the people who faced those threats still felt quite threatened and didn’t know the source — and, once again, refused to concede that the eating-pets story was a lie all along.
Indeed, Vance’s lies were so blatant that even Fox News host Howard Kurtz took him to task, highlighting a claim from DeWine that “these allegations were garbage.” Bonilla and the rest of the MRC refused to tell their readers about this.
Dishonesty about would-be Trump shooter
Regarding that would-be Trump shooter, the MRC peddled dishonesty about that as well. Tom Olohan complained in a Sept. 16 post:
Time magazine came under fire after claiming on social media that the man behind an apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump had an “unclear political ideology,” leaving many in the dark about the apparent violence targeting Trump.
Time concealed Ryan Routh’s political leanings, writing Monday on X, “The suspect arrested in relation to the shooting at Trump’s golf course in Florida on Sunday has been identified as Ryan Routh—a 58-year-old with unclear political ideology, a criminal record, and a history of praising Iran and supporting Ukraine.”
The baffling tweet neglects to highlight the fact that Routh voted in a 2024 Democratic primary and has a recent history of donations to ActBlue—facts that Time itself admitted deep within the article the post links to. But why did Time make no mention of these crucially important details? Is it because such assertions might tie the left to a violent act?
Time is owned by Marc Benioff, the CEO of software company Salesforce and one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s biggest supporters. Benioff, by Time’s own admissions, donated to Harris’s 2019 failed Democratic presidential bid.
As ConWebWatch pointed out when WorldNetDaily did something similar, Routh’s ideology is very much unclear. .Actual fact-checkers at FactCheck.org pointed out that Routh’s political affiliations have, in fact, been all over the place; in recent years he had expressed support for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, but also for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. While he had once been a registered Democrat, he has had no party affiliation since 2002 — inconvenient facts that undermine Olohan’s attempt to portray Routh as a loyal Democrat. Nevertheless, Olohan complained:
But Time didn’t just show possible “bias by placement” by burying these facts in the 13th and 14th paragraphs. Time set social media users who didn’t finish the article up to believe that Routh had an “unclear political ideology.”
Imagine how many X users read the post without even clicking.
Isn’t Olohan displaying bias by omission by not reporting facts inconvenient to his political narrative? Yes, he is.
Jorge Bonilla pulled the same stunt in another post that day when ABC similarly reported on Routh’s scattered ideology, complete with Clinton Equivocation:
Not only was the “direct threat” sanitized to the point of being vague and nondescript, but its foreign element was completely excised. There is no mention of the fact that Routh is calling for Iran to commit the assassination. All of a sudden, the call for foreign intervention in our elections is not worth mentioning- a far cry from 8 years ago and the media’s hysterical coverage of Trump’s tongue-in-cheek call for Russia or China to produce Hillary Clinton’s server if they had it.
And yet, these few seconds of limited coverage were the ONLY coverage of Routh’s appeals to Iranian assassins. There were no mentions of Routh’s book on NBC or CBS, despite the failed assassination being the top story of the evening.
Bonilla also excluded Routh’s full political history since it doesn’t fit his narrative.
Bonilla continued to obsess over one minor detail about Routh in a Sept. 18 post:
Large swaths of the Regime Media have begun to move away from coverage of the security lapses that led to a potential assassin setting up unabated just outside the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. NBC and CBS continue to omit the failed shooter’s calls for Iran to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
On the plus side, there is the fact that at least CBS acknowledged the existence of a self-published book. But coverage was SCANT:
[…]
MacFarlane mentions the book along with some minor disparagement of Trump but stays away from Routh’s appeal to Iran to off Trump (and Routh). MacFarlane then moves on to a quote from Routh’s son before getting reactions from former Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and Senator Lindsey Graham. And that’s it.
CBS’s mention of the book was scant, but NBC did not mention the book at all.
Again, Bonilla omitted Routh’s support for other Republicans that undermine his portrayal of the guy as a Democrat.