The MRC's Trump Shooting Spin
After whining that the media responsibly stuck to reporting only known facts immediately after the assassination attempt, the Media Research Center desperately tried to blame liberals for it.
The Media Research Center’s first, bizarre reaction to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump is to rage at the media for … reporting only what it knew in the immediate aftermath. Joseph Vazquez ranted in a July 13 post:
Despite everyone with functioning brains witnessing that an apparent assassination attempt just occurred on former President Donald Trump’s life on video, CNN instead ran a headline making it seem like he tripped. Yes, you read that right.
“Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally,” read CNN’s grotesque headline after video surfaced of gunshots going off and appearing to graze Trump’s right ear during a Pennsylvania campaign rally. CNN didn’t stop there but proceeded to run with that narrative and didn’t even mention the possibility of gun shots in the original article: “Secret Service agents rushed former President Donald Trump off the stage after he fell to the ground amid loud bangs at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) wrote in a scathing rebuke of CNN’s coverage, “Absolute ghouls.”
In fact, CNN even had the temerity to include the gaslighting of one CNN reporter who spun the shots as possible fireworks: “‘We heard a bunch of … loud cracking noises. At first I thought: Is that fireworks? All of a sudden everyone started screaming,’ said CNN’s Alayna Treene, who was reporting from the rally.”
What’s even worse was that CNN even noted that there was “blood” on Trump’s face in its “What we’re covering” section, but still couldn’t bring itself to concede that a probable assassination attempt just occurred and instead downplayed it: “[D]etails on what exactly happened remain sparse.”
NBC News’ initial headline on the horrifying event was no better: “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after popping noises heard at his Pennsylvania rally.” And over at The Associated Press, readers were left with this barking mad spin in a post on X: “BREAKING: Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd.”
But as Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin wrote, the right-wingers bashing the media for not immediately jumping to conclusions (like Vazquez) don’t understand how responsible reporting in a breaking news event works:
The media learns information incrementally, and publishes what it can confirm. That’s why in the aftermath of the shooting, initial reports brought news of the popping sounds, the blood dripping down Trump’s face, the mad dash to the SUV.
In these kinds of news environments, the best practice for the press is to report what it knows. Often, media critics of limited imagination condemn the press for not reporting what they believe it should assume. It might feel good to see a headline advance your preferred view of what happened, but playing fast and loose with the proven facts serves only to erode the bond of trust between the media and the reader.
All of these news outlets that drew fury for that early reporting quickly updated their stories or published new ones describing the shooting faithfully and in great detail. Indeed, the AP headline above that inspired a critic to label the outlet “disgusting” and “unbelievably mendacious” was soon changed from “Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd,” to “Trump injured but ‘fine’ after attempted assassination at rally, shooter and one attendee are dead.”
[…]
A media that exercises restraint is a good media. It often fails to live up to that standard, but the argument that it should be more reckless in its coverage, not less, is one that will lead to worse, not better reporting.
The Washington Post similarly defended media caution against partisan right-wing haters:
Breaking stories, of course, require the kind of caution USA Today displayed. Not all of the central facts had yet been confirmed by authorities at the time the article was first posted.
“If you heard ‘loud pops,’ that’s all you can say,” said Tom Jones, the daily media columnist for the Poynter Report. “To say more than that, without knowing what it was, would have been incredibly irresponsible. … When dealing with something as critically important as this, you cannot be wrong.”
Vazquez, meanwhile, refused to admit that the media updated their reports on the shooting as more information became available — which would seem to be an act of media malfeasance on his part.
That demand for baseless speculation from the media continued in a post the same day from Jorge Bonilla, who was mad that a news anchor factually stated that “we don’t know what the motivation was” behind the shooting:
Tonight we heard, from NBC’s Lester Holt, the kind of papering over of a shocking act normally reserved for the initial outset of an Islamist terror attack: a declaration of ignorance over the motive that could’ve possibly possessed the individual to do such a thing, to wit: attempt to murder former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
[…]
It is true that there isn’t a granular, specific, underlying idea as to why this shooter climbed up a ladder and onto a roof and attempted to assassinate the former President of the United States. But the motive was clearly to assassinate the former President of the United States. If an al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorist decides to drive a van through a pedestrian thoroughfare, we don’t ponder what may have possessed this “troubled youth” to undertake such a task.
The evil in men’s hearts is what possesses them to do these things, just as an evil man took a rifle to a baseball field and nearly killed Congressman Steve Scalise. And, as we did at the time, it will become necessary to examine the rhetoric that incited the Pennsylvania shooter into acting on the evil within him. Because if there is in place an ecosystem, in media and online, devoted to advancing the idea Trump is Literally Hitler and must be stopped at all costs, over and over again, then eventually someone is going to take it upon themselves to rid the world of Literally Hitler.
That, Mr, Holt, is ultimately what the “motivation” was.
So does that mean if someone opens fire on the offices of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, we can immediately blame the MRC because it played the Literally Hitler card by calling the group “digital brownshirts“? Good to know. Also, Bonilla is being disingenuous; determining the shooter’s specific motivation is very much the point, and as with the reporting immediately after the shooting, he doesn’t understand that it’s journalistically responsible not to speculate — but he wants that speculation anyway because it reflects well on his preferred candidate.
Tim Graham regurgitated all this in his July 16 podcast:
Donald Trump was shot in the ear on Saturday night, and the networks tried to be calm. But the opening was messy. The first bumbled headline at CNN.com was “Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally.” Other headlines didn’t say “shot,” just that Trump was rushed off stage after “popping noises.”
NBC anchor Lester Holt strangely insisted no one knew the shooter’s motive. But wait — we do know the shooter wanted to kill Trump.
He too didn’t seem to want to admit that the initial reporting was updated as more facts became available.
Ultimately, Bonilla, Graham and Vazquez are cynically seeking to exploit Trump’s shooting for partisan political ends that further their employer’s anti-media narratives. That would make them, not the media, the real “ghouls.”
Baselessly blaming liberals
The MRC’s next partisan move on the shooting was to blame Democratic rhetoric for it — again, without knowing the shooter’s motive. Nicholas Fondacaro huffed that right-wing extremist rhetoric was brought up:
Not long after former President Trump was almost assassinated on stage at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart brought never-Trumper Max Boot on as a guest for The Saturday Show and duo proceeded to talk about how political violence was a problem on both sides of the aisle and wanted people to calm down before speaking about it.
“How concerned are you, or should we be, that what we are seeing there on the left side of the screen is something that we are going to see more of?” Capehart asked.
Boot proceed to rant about how America was in “a very dangerous and volatile situation” and how, “We have way too many guns in this country…” “[W]e’re also living in a very polarized partisan climate where you could easily imagine you might have extremists on either side or no side at all, just people who are driven mad by events and engage in horrible acts of violence,” he added.
Of course, then can the bothsidesing of the political violence despite much of the recent attacks coming from the left:
Fondacaro didn’t explain why Trump shouldn’t be held accountable for his own authoritarian-leaning rhetoric. He also glossed over the fact that Boot brought up the most recent episode of right-wing violence in the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which the MRC desperately tried to spin away at the time.
Alex Christy complained it was pointed out that rhetoric from Trump and his campaign didn’t cool down after the incident:
CBS’s host of Face the Nation, Margaret Brennan, joined the network’s breaking coverage of Saturday’s assassination attempt of former President Trump at his Pennsylvania rally, where she was dismayed that a statement from campaign advisor Chris LaCivita might “escalate” Trump’s “us versus the system” rhetoric and that a statement from Trump himself didn’t lower “the temperature” even though once could make a solid case that it did.
When it was pointed out that Trump campaign advisor sent out an inflammatory tweet stating “They tried to keep Trump off the ballot and they tried to put him in jail and now you see this,” Christy tried to deflect by lamely writing, “It is worth noting that LaCivta would later delete his post.”
Fondacaro returned to quote his favorite CNN right-winger trying to blame non-right-wingers:
Unfortunately, the liberal media seemed unable to reflect on how things got to the point where former President Trump was nearly assassinated. In the hours following the attempt on Trump’s life on Saturday, CNN Republican commentator Scott Jennings condemned the anti-Trump, doomsaying election rhetoric parroted by the likes of his network, the rest of the liberal media, and Democrats for leading to what happened. But host Wolf Blitzer wanted to play the “both sides” game and blame the victim.
Jennings started out by calling out the “extreme” rhetoric they’ve been using that claimed the country would cease to exist if Trump was elected again; warning that “these things have consequences”:
[…]
Blitzer proceeded to whine about Trump had made “very, very strong statements” again Biden and blamed “both sides.” Jennings had to remind him which of the two was in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head:
Reminder: When it was pointed out that right-wing rhetoric likely played a role in the attack on Pelosi’s husband, the MRC went into spin mode and played whataboutism.
Curtis Houck similarly distracted from questions about right-wing rhetoric, going on to whine that one TV guest was given “room to run rampant by concocting some twisted future in which Trump supporters murder anti-Trump protesters outside the upcoming Republican National Convention.” Given what happened to Pelosi’s husband, it is really that “twisted” to ponder?
Graham was upset that people were reminded of right-wing violence in not only of the attack on Pelosi’s husband but also the Capitol riot:
Breaking-news live coverage can get things wrong in the heat of the moment, but there’s no excuse for partisanship to break out. After the assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, I was looking out for talk of the January 6 riot. It happened at about 9:16 on CBS, as anchor Margaret Brennan was talking to Samantha Vinograd, a former Obama official at the Department of Homeland Security (who became a CNN contributor before joining CBS).
Vinograd raised the prospect of “retaliatory violence” based on anger at vicious criticism of Donald Trump, called it “frankly unpatriotic” to tie this, for example, to President Biden who said on July 8 that “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
CBS wasn’t explicitly citing that, they blurred it into blaming “the government.” Vinograd then connected this notion to January 6 and the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi:
Rather than respond to anything Vinograd said, Graham resorted to personal attacks, calling him “an anti-Trump hothead”— as if Grhaam isn’t a pro-Trump hothead.
Houck ranted that CBS “Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan had the gall to lecture House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) about rhetoric even though Scalise himself was nearly assassinated in June 2017 by a far-left kook”:
Brennan wasn’t done debasing herself as she twice tried to have Scalise denounce Republican Congressman Mike Collins (R-GA) for having tweeted “Joe Biden sent the orders” in reference to Biden rhetorically stating earlier in the week that Trump had to be “put…in a bullseye”.
She wouldn’t mention that context, of course.
Instead, she demanded Scalise answer whether there was “any information whatsoever to link…the U.S. government to what happened”. Obviously, Scalise said no and vaguely alluded to “comments form Joe Biden” earlier, but said any rampant speculation should “stop immediately”.
The CBS host continued to pummel Scalise about rhetoric demanding he state “that no member should in any way insinuate anything without actually knowing fact first considering we’re in a “very dangerous moment.”
The MRC has previously (and libelously) claimed without evidence that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow “inspired” the shooter of Scalise and others.
‘Bullseye’ obsession
In addition to its usual dishonest media criticism and liberal-blaming, the MRC latched onto a certain word immediately after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump:
Graham complained that one “raised the prospect of “retaliatory violence” based on anger at vicious criticism of Donald Trump, called it “frankly unpatriotic” to tie this, for example, to President Biden who said on July 8 that “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
Houck ranted that CBS host Margaret Brennan “twice tried to have [Se. Steve] Scalise denounce Republican Congressman Mike Collins (R-GA) for having tweeted “Joe Biden sent the orders” in reference to Biden rhetorically stating earlier in the week that Trump had to be “put…in a bullseye”.
If you know your recent political history, you know what that bullseye reference is alluding to. Clay Waters went into that history in a July 14 post:
The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening reminded some news watchers of what President Joe Biden said to Democratic donors six days ago, as reported by the New York Times: “During a video call with top donors on Monday, Mr. Biden told them: “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.”
One may scoff at the idea that a metaphorical comment like Biden’s “bulls-eye” could possibly lead to an attempted assassination of Trump – yet, in 2011 the New York Times bizarrely blamed a campaign map issued by former John McCain running mate Sarah Palin’s political action committee for the attempted assassination of Democratic Rep. Giffords of Arizona.
After the January 2011 attack on Rep. Giffords and others, the press and the Times in particular pinned the blame on a map put out by Palin’s PAC a year before, in March 2010, that included Giffords’ district marked with a “crosshair” target, a symbol that identified congressional districts whose representative voted for Obamacare.
Giffords’ shooter Jared Lee Loughner was schizophrenic, and there was no evidence he was a Republican, a Palin fan, or had ever seen the graphic. That didn’t stop the Times from imposing a “violent rhetoric” template upon a Republican.
Then-Times media reporter Brian Stelter and investigative reporter Dan Van Natta Jr. egged the media to go after Palin’s campaign map on their Twitter accounts. Van Natta linked to an old Huffington Post article on the Palin “gun sights” on Gifford’s district. Stelter threw out red meat: “For the record, there has been no mention of Sarah Palin’s target map on any cable news channel.”
He didn’t have to wait long. A front-page story by congressional reporter Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike headlined “Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics” quickly focused on Palin’s “cross hairs” map:
[…]
Will the Times ever raise similar concerns about violent political tactics arising from Biden’s “bulls-eye,” not to mention any second thoughts about the “Trump is a fascist” drumbeat the press itself has encouraged for years? Will the Times voice any concerns about President Biden encouraging “stochastic terrorism” and undermining democracy, which the Times constantly accuses Trump of?
The Times did bring up the bulls-eye in a front-page story on Sunday, not as a full story supporting the blame-Biden thesis but rather in dismissive fashion, first loading up a “far-right” label to discredit the idea. The 40th out of 43 paragraphs:
Waters didn’t factually rebut any of those claims about Trump, and he, like the rest of the world, knew nothing about the shooter at the time of his post, let alone that he reads the New York Times closely enough to internalize a statement of obvious political rhetoric by Biden.
But Waters should perhaps be thanked for saying the quiet part out loud: The MRC is going to cynically exploit the Trump shooting to peddle more anti-media grudges. After all, pushing narratives is more important than sticking to the facts. Thus, the “bullseye” narrative must go forward:
A July 15 post by Graham happily quoted former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy saying, “I look at our current president that less than two weeks ago said, you put a bullseye on Donald Trump. What I’m trying to be is a fair American to tell everybody to dial back.”
A post the same say by Bonilla groused that in an interview, Biden was “stumbling his way around the ‘bullseye’ answer.”
Fondacaro huffed in his July 16 hate-watch of “The View”: “Following a soundbite of President Biden falsely claiming he doesn’t use inciting rhetoric against his political opponent (he recently said to put a ‘bulls-eye’ on Trump), moderator Whoopi Goldberg (back from her latest bought of COVID) suggested the incendiary rhetoric didn’t come from her side.”
Graham referenced an interview of Biden by NBC’s Lester Holt in his July 17 column: “To his credit, Holt focused on Biden’s fierce words, that he told his supporters before the shooting that Trump was an “existential threat” and they should put Trump in the “bullseye.” Biden said it was a mistake, and then launched into an attack on Trump, saying he had many lies in the debate and that ‘I’m not the guy who said I want to be a dictator on Day One.'”
Daniel McCarthy wrote in his July 19 column: “When President Biden himself talks about putting Trump in a bull’s-eye, isn’t that language likely to lead to someone like Crooks actually putting him in the crosshairs?”
No mention, of course, of how the MRC tried to spin away from that Palin “bullseye” flyer back in the day; as we documented at the time, MRC chief Brent Bozell ranted that “The Daily Kos whackjob website has got targets over faces that they don’t like” — never mind that it wasn’t actually true.
Still blaming liberals
In the following few days as more was learned about the shooting, the MRC leaned further into its baseless blame-liberals narrative, even though there was still no support for the claim. Tim Graham wrote in a July 15 “flashback” post:
After energetic talk over the weekend that no one should blame President Biden or the Democrats (or the media) for inspiring violence against President Trump and his supporters, we need to remind you of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, where the liberal media decided to accuse conservative talk radio for domestic terrorism that destroyed a federal building.
Graham offered no evidence that right-wing talk radio did not have any influence on bombing perpetrator Timothy McVeigh; indeed, he was very much influenced by right-wing extremism, which was disseminated in part by talk radio. But who needs evidence when you have a conspiracy theory to promote?
Graham sneered in his July 16 podcast: “NBC anchor Lester Holt strangely insisted no one knew the shooter’s motive. But wait — we do know the shooter wanted to kill Trump.” And as he was advancing his own spin, he was accusing others of spinning:
But a spin did emerge. They insisted Republicans can’t blame Democrats for inspiring violence based on all their talk of Trump being Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Covid killer, or any of that rhetoric.
Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan was anchoring for CBS and she was angry at Republicans for blaming Biden for his tone before the shooting. She lectured about anyone “drawing some connection to the government. We have nothing to base that on at this hour.” She brought on former Obama adviser Samantha Vinograd, who added “it is frankly unpatriotic at this moment to be stoking the flames when we know we are sitting on a cauldron of tensions.”
Brennan also complained that after he was shot, Donald Trump didn’t urge his supporters to calm down their commentary. The Washington Post on Sunday underlined no motive was apparent, but carried this headline: “Trump allies immediately blame Biden, Democrats for their rhetoric.”
Graham’s boss, Brent Bozell, ran to his good friend Mark Levin to further spout the narrative:
MRC founder and president Brent Bozell was interviewed on national radio on Monday night on Mark Levin’s show to discuss the intensity of media bias leading into the horrific shooting at former president Donald Trump on Saturday night. He began by saying we don’t need any lectures from President Biden about hateful rhetoric.
Then there’s the media. Bozell told Levin “Isn’t it telling that MSNBC would not trust its own anchors this morning, to have them on the air? They couldn’t trust Joe Scarborough and Mika not to say something that was purely incendiary. They couldn’t trust their own staff. What does that tell you about how out of control the media have gotten?”
Levin lamented that corporate executives above the journalists do nothing about the hot talk, that Joy Reid can incessantly compare Trump to Hitler and nothing happens. Bozell replied: “The news media, it’s the only industry I know of where management doesn’t control its employees. The owners of these corporations have no interest in controlling their news outlets whatsoever. Okay, so fine, take responsibility for what happens thereafter,” that Trump was very nearly killed.
Bozell predicted in the coming days, Biden is going to go back to his old nasty self on the campaign trail, and nobody in the media is going to call him out for it. But every reporter is going to be hanging on every word Trump says until he says something confrontational, “here he goes again.” They’ll go out of their way to deflect blame and put it back on Trump.
ConWebWatch remembers when the MRC was tacitly endorsing violence against journalists, insisting that it was “self-centered” for journalists to be worried about their safety and laughably denying that Trump’s anti-media rhetoric was inspiring such violence.
The MRC also continued to hypocritically complain that non-right-wingers continued to criticize Trump after the shooting. Fondacaro did his hate-watching routine of “The View” in a July 15 post:
ABC’s The View – like the rest of the liberal media – had used incendiary rhetoric against former President Trump for years and had hosted many calls for violence against their political opponents. Yet, in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump, the liberal ladies opened their Monday show with mealy-mouth lip service to the need to tamp down the rhetoric; refusing to issue any apology for what they’ve said and allowed on their program, and blamed gun rights for the attack.
After playing a clip of the shooting and a soundbite of President Biden’s Oval Office address where he said “We can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” moderator Joy Behar agreed by questioned if it could happen: “I think we all agree with Biden…Is that even possible, ladies?”
Faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin was the first to speak. She didn’t walk back any of her previous hyperbolic and incendiary claims that Trump was an existential threat to the country, but opined about how it was “a moment for reflection on the tone and tenor of our politics, and one thing that is fundamentally American is the right to criticize policies. It is also the right to criticize the character of our politicians, but the way in which we do it matters.”
“And we live in an era where escalatory rhetoric and saying the most damning and inciting thing is oftentimes what’s rewarded. And I think it’s incumbent on all of us to just check how we engage,” she proclaimed without looking in a mirror.
(Fondacaro again falsely smeared smeared co-host Sunny Hostin as “staunchly racist and anti-Semitic,” thus contributing yet more evidence for her eventual lawsuit against him and his employer.)
Bonilla tried to blame Biden for inflammatory rhetoric after an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt:
NBC’s Lester Holt sat down with President Joe Biden for a much-hyped interview that would kick off Biden’s counterprogramming of the Republican National Convention, which kicked off tonight. Despite President Biden’s calls to lower the temperature in the wake of the failed attempt to assassinate former President Donald Trump, his rhetoric remains pretty much the same and met little pushback from Holt.
[…]
From watching this interview, with its blatant mischaracterizations and unchecked untruths, one wonders whether Biden remembers the words he read from the Teleprompter on Sunday. Between that and Holt’s acquiescent lack of pushback or fact-checking, with its laser focus on potential withdrawal from the presidential race, we are reminded of the things that have contributed to the current political environment and led to calls for a “lowering of the temperature”. Tonight’s interview did not serve that purpose.
Bonilla said nothing about Trump’s role in raising temperatures.