The Media Research Center surprisingly didn’t do much to exploit the New Orleans terror attack — perhaps because it happened on New Year’s Day and it didn’t want to be bothered too much on a holiday. The initial response came in a Jan. 2 post by Mark Finkelstein, who was more interested in lashing out at President Biden and Joe Scarborough:
Joe Scarborough chose a good day to be absent from Morning Joe. He wasn’t exposed to direct contradiction and disgrace for his blatant lie to Americans about Joe Biden’s mental acuity — or lack thereof.
Even so, the show did its best to cover for Biden — and for itself and the rest of the liberal media — which for years buried the truth about Biden’s shocking decline.
The clip that Morning Joe played of Biden’s comments on the ISIS-inspired New Orleans terror attack was bad enough. Biden stumbled and slurred throughout.
But you’ll notice an editing pause midway through the Morning Joe clip, in which part of Biden’s remarks were omitted. Morning Joe had obligingly edited out the worst of the statement, where Biden totally lost the plot, and pitifully scrambled his way back.
[…]This sad shell of a man is who Scarborough would have foisted on Americans for four more years if he could have gotten away with it — until Biden’s disastrous debate performance made sustaining the charade impossible.
But even now, as in today’s Morning Joe clip, the liberal media continues to try to cover for Biden. It’s as if they don’t want the American people to realize just how bad it would have been if, with the MSM’s connivance, Biden had managed to get back into the White House for another term.
Alex Christy was more on point with the expected right-wing narrative, expressing anger that people didn’t want to rush to conclusions about the attack in the immediate aftermath before all the facts were known:
If someone plows their truck into a crowd of people celebrating New Year’s with an ISIS flag and IEDs are found at the scene of the attack, what would you call that? It seems like a simple question, but for the cast of Thursday’s CNN Newsroom, it wasn’t as they shamed the Democratic mayor of New Orleans for calling the attack on her city an act of terrorism.
Host Pamela Brown asked national security analyst Juliette Kayyem, “I mean, I’ve sadly covered too many tragedies like this and it struck me because normally you don’t come right out of the gate and label it a terrorist attack or not, Juliette, you know, you say ‘we’re looking into all possibilities’ because it’s so early, you don’t really know. And there were these explosive devices. This suspect shot at police and hit two police officers. Ten people are killed. More than 30 in the hospital. I mean, this is horrific, Juliette, how do you see this?”
[…]The definition of terrorism is an attack on civilians by a non-state actor in order to intimidate them in pursuit of a religious and or political objective. If what happened in New Orleans does not fit that definition, then what does?
Curtis Houck was outraged that a commentator pointed out there’s not much distance between Islamic extremism and Christian extremism:
On Wednesday during NBC’s special rolling coverage of the Islamic terror attack in New Orleans, correspondent intelligence community tool Ken Dilanian chose not once or twice, but three times to tie Islamic extremism to “extremist ideologies” like “far-right extremism.”
The most notable came during NBC Nightly News and anchor Lester Holt — who was the only network evening newscast anchor working a rare holiday — asking a simple question: “What does this tell us about the state of ISIS as we launch into 2025?”
Sure, Dilanian started by saying “the FBI director and others, Lester, have saying for some time that the threat from ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks is greater than it’s been for a long time, particular post-October 7 in light of the war in Gaza.”
But he shortly thereafter lumped the boogeymen on the “far-right” in with the Islamists:
[…]Bacin [sic] the 3:00 p.m. Eastern hour and Dilanian had a similar shtick. He told NBC News Daily co-host Kate Snow that the New Orleans attack was “one of the most significant if not the most significant Islamic-inspired terrorists attacks, if that’s what it was given the ISIS flag, since 9/11 in years…going back to San Bernadino” from December 2, 2015.
Sure enough, he threw away the astute perspective by touting the concerns from his buddies about “right-wing or domestic terrorism”:
[…]Fast-forward to roughly 5:09 p.m. Eastern, Dilianian had this back and forth with MSNBC’s Yasmin Vossoughian about “the climate of hate and extremism” that includes the “far right”[.]
Houck made no effort to refute anything Dilanian said.
Christy returned to complain in a Jan. 3 post that a commentator pointed out that white people commit crimes too:
New York Times columnist Charles Blow joined MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday’s installment of The ReidOut to react to the reaction to the New Orleans New Year’s truck attack by an ISIS supporter that killed 14 people where he claimed that the big problem is that the attack was “one crime committed by one name that sounds exotic,” and that allows people to ignore the “really big problem, which is young white men in America.”
Reid led Blow with a statement rather than a question, “And last word to you on this, Charles, because this is the challenge. It’s very difficult to feel safe when, on top of everything that Mayor Landrieu just said, you have politicians that have a self-interest in lying about everything because it helps them with the political narrative, not concerned about the human narrative that could actually be really helpful.”
Speaking of young white men in America, Christy made no mention of an incident that happened the same day. Matthew Livelsberger, an Army special operations solider who reportedly supported Donald Trump, rented a Tesla Cybertruck and drove to Las Vegas, where he set off an explosion inside the truck outside the Trump International Hotel there, then committed suicide — all of which initially looked like a terrorist attack. In fact, no MRC writer mentioned this incident at all. Doesn’t fit into right-wing narratives, apparently.