Earlier this year, the Media Research Center spent a lot of time trying to blame the California wildfires on DEI initiatives (as well as liberals in general and gay people in particular), despite the lack of actual evidence to back it up. Following the plane crash outside Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, the MRC played the same partisan and cynical blame game. Nicholas Fondacaro spent a Jan. 30 post complaining that President Trump’s attempt to blame DEI for the crash was called out:
In the wake of President Trump’s Thursday press conference on the deadly and tragic mid-air collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA), CBS senior White House correspondent Ed O’Keefe decried Trump for “jumping to conclusions” by saying diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs may have played a role in the incident.
[…]O’Keefe said Trump had, “avoided questions about whether he was seeing something specific in who was involved in this, either the air traffic control tower or abort either of the aircraft, that would suggest that somebody in this was hired under one of those programs, or is a minority, or something else.”
The line about Trump knowing if someone involved “is a minority,” was the typical liberal media trope suggesting that Trump and those opposed to DEI were simply racists.
“But that appeared to be what he was inferring and then began to back off of it throughout the news conference, suggesting instead that,’ look, mistakes were made and we will have an investigation,’” O’Keefe added.
But there is, in fact, an element of racism in the right-wing anti-DEI crusade. Curtis Houck, meanwhile, complained that reporters called out Trump personally at a press conference:
Following opening remarks that ranged from a moment of silence to speculating barely 12 hours after the crash about its cause having been pilot error or even diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs (and then remarks from Secretaries Duffy and Hegseth and Vice President Vance), ABC’s Mary Bruce leapt at the chance to chide Trump:
[…]The New York Times’s David Sanger offered a personal summation to Trump of what the latter had said: “Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake and then said perhaps the helicopter pilots were the ones who made the mistake….I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion now that diversity had something to do with this crash.”
NBC’s Peter Alexander set Trump off by deeming it “demonstrably false” that Trump had ended DEI efforts inside the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) started by the Biden administration. The two tussled and, when Trump tried to move on, Alexander kept shouting, leading Trump to tell him “quiet, quiet”:
Interestingly, Houck did quietly admit Trump didn’t know what he was talking about, albeit couched amid praise for a Trump Regime Media reporter for doing her partisan job: “Instead of feigning outrage over Trump’s dubious claims, Fox’s Jacqui Heinrich kept her focus on the crash and the victims.”
Fondacaro whined further in another Jan. 30 post:
Just minutes after news broke of the tragic mid-air collision between a commercial airliner and an Army Blackhawk, members of the liberal media rushed to politicize the accident by blaming President Trump and his cuts to federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs (including at the FAA). And when Trump spoke out in his defense during a Thursday press conference and floated the idea that DEI programs might have played a role, two NBC News reporters were up in arms and insisted Trump, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ruined the investigation.
Amid his update on the recovery process underway in the Potomac River, NBC aviation correspondent Tom Costello complained that Trump had gone against how the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) goes about announcing updates and conducting investigations:
[…]Costello went further and suggested Trump had seriously damaged the investigation. “[The NTSB is] an independent investigative body for that very reason, so that they can act, hopefully, without any political influence whatsoever and come to the facts,” he said. “And- I just wonder whether their jobs might have just gotten a little bit more difficult based on that news conference.”
[…]Next up was the near hysterics of national security correspondent Courtney Kube, who showed that NBC wasn’t even on the same page about which way Trump was supposedly putting his thumb on the investigation’s scale.
Fondacaro tried to cover up the fact that Trump was blaming DEI even though he did not name the soldiers by name:
Despite the fact that the names of the soldiers were not shared publicly, Kube shrieked about how they supposedly broke the “very sacrosanct” rule not to publicly provide personal information of “someone who has been killed in uniform until 24 hours after all of their next of kin have been notified.”
“I have got to tell you- years of covering this building and covering the military, that is a policy that I have never seen violated in any way,” she clutched her pearls.
She eventually admitted “he did not provide the names,” but she still tried to have her cake and eat it too: “but even just putting the ranks out, of the individuals there, that’s a- a real departure from what we usually hear, in situations like this.”
Fondacaro did not accuse Trump of politicizing the crash by injecting DEI into the conversation.
It was then Jorge Bonilla’s turn to politicize the crash by whining that Trump was called out:
With President Trump back in office, the hostile media have gone back to showing interest in presidential assertions made “without evidence”. This Trump coverage classic made its return as the media melted down over Trump calling out hiring practices at the FAA that placed a heavy emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In so doing, the media actually ignored a ton of evidence.
Most emblematic of this coverage is the most Trump-hostile network newscast, ABC World News Tonight[:] […]
So enamored was Muir of his line about Trump offering a moment of silence before going into the DEI stuff that he said it twice before even getting to the report. Muir tosses to Chief Biden Apple Polishing Correspondent Mary Bruce, who restored the “without evidence” line to White House coverage from its four-year sabbatical.
Bonilla then went into denial about the lack of evidence, citing various right-wing websites lashing out at DEI over the past several years:
The problem with “without evidence” is that it is an invitation to ignore evidence already on the record. Over the course of monitoring the network newscasts, we found six different mentions of air traffic controller shortages or of air traffic controllers being tasked with performing two roles simultaneously.
With Trump mentioning the DEI stuff front and center, the media have an excuse with which to mention staffing issues at the FAA- but in a manner that is adversarial to Trump: by Trumpwashing this story and making it about Trump’s remarks rather than the context of what was said.
The truth is that there is a body of evidence to suggest there may, in fact, be something to what Trump is saying- evidence that was in the public domain long before Trump said what he said. In fact, multiple conservative publications reported on this well before the crash.
[…]There is an entire body of reporting that could be reasonably described as evidence in support of statements asserting that the primacy of DEI as a hiring criteria at the Federal Aviation Administration undermined national air travel long before the crash. The media willfully ignored this body of work in order to rush to score their cheap “without evidence” hit against Trump.
Some might even say they did so…without evidence.
Bonilla offered no specific evidence that DEI played any role whatsoever in the crash, meaning the media was correct to call out that lack of evidence.
Houck raged that CNN called out Trump’s anti-DEI politicization:
CNN was unglued late Thursday morning and early afternoon over President Donald Trump’s remarks at the White House press briefing on the deadly mi-air collision over the Potomac River with aviation correspondent Pete Muntean — who had otherwise been invaluable in his analysis and reporting — joining other unsurprising characters in channeling now-former colleague Jim Acosta.
Weekday morning CNN Newsroom host Pamela Brown huffed immediately after that Trump “pretty immediately made this political, blaming DEI and the Democrats on that mid-air collision without providing evidence” and “was a little bit all over the map talking about DEI policies and the FAA, but then questioning the helicopter and the altitude and why it didn’t, in his words, stop or make another move.”
Muntean, a private pilot himself and previous stints in local news, huffed he “put my head in my hands, Pam, when the President said that” and sounded like Brian Stelter or Donie O’Sullivan in hurling disgust at “the far right” for having “pushed” back against DEI policies.
[…]Brown closed her show with the disgustingly disingenous take that they’re most concerned about the “67 families who are mourning because of this midair collision, who are looking for answers, who don’t want politics.”
Earth to Pamela: What does CNN do seemingly seconds after learning of a mass shooting. Hint, it’s an eight-letter word that starts with a “p” and ended the previous graph.
Houck didn’t explain why noting the obvious proliferation of guns in America and the role that plays in mass shootings is “politics.”
Fondacaro made sure to work the crash and the DEI argument into his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
Did you vote for President Trump in the 2024 presidential election? Well, if you did, ABC co-host Sunny Hostin of The Viewclaimed you were a reason for why an American Airlines jet and an Army Blackhawk helicopter collided in midair over Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. According to her, it was the “very telling” “result” of you wanting to “blow things up” in Washington, D.C.
Amid their outrage at President Trump for suggesting the Obama and Biden administrations’ DEI programs to have the FAA hire people with “severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability,” Hostin huffed: “Yeah, I’m not going to dignify his remarks about DEI. I’m not going to do that.”
Being one who experiences chronic racial grievance, Hostin would usually try to write of criticism of DEI as racist or made up. But the reality was that she couldn’t because those were the hiring parameters the FAA had published on their website.
Fondacaro offered no evidence that anyone with “severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability” ever worked as an air traffic controller.