One of the Media Research Center’s narratives in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump was to blame liberals for it — never mind that it had absolutely no evidence to back it up, given the dearth of knowledge about the shooter. In the following few days as more was learned about the shooting, the MRC leaned further into that narrative, even though there was still no support for the claim that liberals were to blame. 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 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.
We remember 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.
In addition to blaming a “bullseye” remark by President Biden for the shooting — a cynical attempt at revenge for criticism of Sarah Palin over a similar incident prior to the shooting of Gabby Giffords — the MRC continued to hypocritically complain that non-right-wingers continued to criticize Trump after the shooting. Nicholas 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.)
Jorge 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.