After whining that Republicans were being called out for exploiting the death of Laken Riley by an illegal immigrant to feed their anti-immigrant narratives, the Media Research Center moved on to trying to blame President Biden for her death, despite never identifying no action directly linking him to it. Tim Graham responded in a March 1 post to a reporter calling out Donald Trump for blaming Biden for the crime by playing whataboutism: “That would be unfair, to connect Biden to a death? Interesting, since CBS in 2019 was aiding Democrat presidential candidates in connecting a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso to Trump.”
In a March 6 post, Curtis Houck cheered right-wing Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy for asking White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre if Biden would “publicly address Laken Riley’s murder allegedly at the hands of an illegal immigrant” during his State of the Union address, whining that “Jean-Pierre callously linked Riley’s murder to Republicans not taking the Senate border deal supported by the White House.” Houck didn’t explain why Republicans should have rejected a bipartisan deal.
When Biden did reference Riley, the MRC melted down because he mispronounced her name:
- Nicholas Fondacaro screeched about “Biden’s bumbling, stumbling, and disgraceful mispronunciation of Laken Riley’s name.”
- Houck complained that one correspondent “refused to mention Biden mispronounced her name.” He then attacked another correspondent who “didn’t take notice of Biden referring to Laken Riley as ‘Lincoln Riley.'”
- Foncacaro returned to huff that Biden “butchered her name.”
By contrast, the MRC cheered when Donald Trump deliberately and repeatedly mispronounced Kamala Harris’ name on the campaign trail. Still, Geoffrey Dickens listed this among “eight brand new Biden gaffes” that “the networks (mostly) refused to cover” in a March 27 post, and referenced Riley’s death and Biden’s mispronunciation in an April 11 post listing “six of the most horrific cases of innocent victims killed by illegal immigrants during the Biden administration.”
Then it was back to exploiting Riley’s death for its partisan agenda, as Jorge Bonilla did in a May 8 post:
The murder of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley shook the nation, and hammered home the real dangers to which the nation became exposed when the border was flung open on January 20th, 2021. The media has been reluctant to cover the story because it casts Democrats (generally) and President Joe Biden (specifically) in a very bad light. That reluctance continues to this day.
CBS Evening News was the only national network newscast to report on the indictment of the illegal alien that murdered Laken Riley.
[…]The national news media, bent on protecting Biden, will do everything they can to avoid covering this story, which hammers home the dangers of imposing open-borders policies upon a nation that wants nothing to do with them.
When the alleged killer was reported to have ties to the Venezuelan-based Tren de Aragua gang — whom Bonilla fearmongered about in connection to gang activity in a Colorado town — the MRC was on that too:
- Bonilla hyped in an Aug. 29 post that “Tren de Aragua has become something of a household name as of late, with a history of criming all over the nation including, most notoriously, the murder of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.”
- Bonilla similarly touted in a Sept. 29 post that the killer “reportedly has ties to the murderous Tren de Aragua gang that has established multiple beachheads across several U.S. cities.”
Bonilla used an Oct. 16 post to cheer biased Fox News host Bret Baier for boosting the pro-Trump narrative during his interview with Kamala Harris, gushing how he “pivot[ed] to saying the names of Jocelyn Nungaray, Rachel Morin and Laken Riley, who were brutally murdered by illegal migrants.”