After serving up the usual distractions in attempting to deny that the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi wasn’t inspired by heated right-wing rhetoric against Nancy Pelosi, it was time for the Media Research Center to advance to more formal bouts of whataboutism. Nicholas Fondacaro huffed in a Nov. 2 post:
With less than a week until Election Day, the liberal media are trying to milk the heinous attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband, Paul Pelosi, for all it’s worth. Despite the fact that political violence has hit both parties, the liberal media show far less concern when conservatives are involved. NewsBusters examined the first five days of the Pelosi attack and found that it was 11 times larger than the amount of coverage on the major broadcast network (ABC, CBS, and NBC morning, evening, and Sunday morning shows had given over the same period to the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
[…]The liberal media have spent so much time on the Pelosi attack to stoke fear of Republicans ahead of the midterm elections, with the Pelosi attack weaved into segments warning of intimidation and possible attacks at the polls.
Fondacaro didn’t mention that there was no genuine “attempted assassination” of Kavanaugh — the alleged assailant’s gun was unloaded and he turned himself in before he actually did anything — and that inherently makes the story less newsworthy.
That study got repeated on the MRC’s podcast that day, guest-hosted by Fondacaro, who wrote:
On this episode of the NewsBusters Podcast, managing editor Curtis Houck and I discuss how the liberal media aren’t letting a good crisis go to waste as they use the heinous attack against Paul Pelosi (Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) husband as a prop to help Democratic chances in midterm elections.
We break down a new NewsBusters study exposing how the liberal broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) have given the Pelosi attack 11 times the airtime of the assassination attempt of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. With the Kavanaugh attack falling out of the cycle in 24 hours.
Kevin Tober tried playing whataboutism with a different incident in a Nov. 3 post:
The leftist media spent most of the past week wringing their hands over an allegedly politically motivated attack against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul but they have been silent on a shooting that took place at the home of Republican North Carolina congressional candidate Pat Harrigan’s parents. The shooter fired a gun through the window of the home where his children were sleeping, but thankfully no one was injured or killed.
ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News all ignored the incident on their Thursday evening newscasts. Instead of reporting on the latest violent attack against Republicans, the three networks decided local weather reports and a cotton shortage allegedly caused by “climate change” were all more important stories than a Republican candidate’s family’s home getting shot at.
Tober downplayed the fact that the incident happened on Oct. 18 — a full two weeks before it was reported in the media — and there has been no evidence presented thus far that the incident was politically motivated. Still, Tober didn’t let that distract him from staying on the message he’s being paid to deliver:
If Harrigan was a Democrat, the networks would’ve reported on this and used it as another example of Republican rhetoric killing “democracy.”
We already know the leftist media seeks to downplay violent attacks against conservatives while hyping violence against leftists.
Rich Noyes served up his own unhappy whataboutrism angle in a Nov. 5 “flashback” post:
An exceptionally repulsive feature of journalism these days is when media figures use tragedies to smear their political adversaries as dangerous threats. That’s clearly happening now, in the wake of last week’s savage hammer attack on Paul Pelosi — first thing Monday morning, for example, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski flatly blamed “years of Republican propaganda and Trump-fueled fascism” for the crime.
It also happened in April 1995, after the horrific truck bomb in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, including many young children at a day care center. Stung by liberal losses in the 1994 midterms, Democratic politicians and the media smeared conservative talk radio as culpable. “Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence,” NBC’s Bryant Gumbel smarmily suggested, “but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue.” (Read more here.)
And it happened in January 2011, weeks after Democrats lost control of Congress in midterm elections. Mere minutes after a mentally-ill man shot Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and 18 other citizens, killing six — and before any actual information was known about the shooter and his motive — irresponsible journalists accused the conservative Tea Party for the bloodbath.
It was disgusting, and utterly without foundation. Yet in the days that followed the attack, the news was filled with accusations that harsh political rhetoric was at fault, and singled out conservatives by an eight-to-one margin. Then as now, liberal journalists exploited a terrible tragedy, perpetrated by a delusional schizophrenic, in order to discredit the wider conservative movement.
The now-retired Noyes didn’t mention that his former co-workers heavily hyped the story of a Republican campaign volunteer in Florida being beaten in order to link Democrats to the violence — before it was discovered that the volunteer was a notorious white supremacist and the attack apparently had nothing to do with politics.
Once again, the MRC is criticizing someone for doing the exact same thing it does.