Following the assassination of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband and the shooting of two others, the Media Research Center’s first response was to blame the governor of Minnesota — who just happened to be the Democratic vice presidential candidate last year — for it. Mark Finkelstein huffed in a June 16 post:
Short-term memory loss at CNN.
Host Audie Cornish opened CNN This Morning’s coverage of the arrest of the man suspected of assassinating a Minnesota state legislator and her husband, and wounding two others, with a clip of Gopher State Governor Tim Walz telling people that “rather than arguing, shake hands, find common ground.”
This is the same guy who recently boasted, speaking of Trump supporters, that he can “kick most of their ass.”
And just last month, here was Walz’s proposal to fight back against Trump:
“Be a little meaner, maybe it’s time for us to be a little more fierce. We have to ferociously push back on this. When the bully is an adult like Donald Trump, you bully him back.”
In May, the national media couldn’t seem to locate Walz ranting in a commencement speech at the University of Minnesota Law School that “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.” How’s that for “shaking hands, finding common ground”?
There was not a word in CNN’s segment about kick-ass Timmy. Only the highlighting of his handshake exhortation, and criticism from former Obama official Juliette Kayyem about how people, including a Republican senator, are trying to distort the shooter’s politics.
Nicholas Fondacaro played a different kind of whataboutism in his June 16 hate-watch of “The View”:
As NewsBusters has documented for years, ABC’s The View has a serious problem with incendiary rhetoric designed to inflame political tensions, incite violence, and generally disregard the lives of conservatives. So, their toxic hypocrisy was fairly potent during Monday’s episode when the cast were demanding the rhetoric be toned down following the assassination of Democratic state representatives in Minnesota, something the openly refused to do after the attempts on President Trump.
Pretend independent Sara Haines whined about what described as “a slow dehumanization of the ‘other.’ Whatever that ‘other’ is to someone. In this instance it’s a political division.” She demanded that the government fire Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) because of some tweets she didn’t like.
Fondacaro curiously refused to discuss the content of Lee’s tweets — which, as it turned out, mocked the victims in Minnesota. Fondacaro did not explain why Haines should not have been upset by a prominent Republican politician mocking murder victims.
Intern Shannon Sauders dutifully followed her employer’s narrative by drawing attention away from the assassination:
On Monday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe invited Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois to discuss her troubles with the U.S. Army’s 250th-anniversary parade that also fell on President Trump’s birthday on Saturday. Duckworth did not hold back her aggressive thoughts on Trump and referred to him as a “tinpot dictator wannabe.”
But about four minutes later, when MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire asked about the murder of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, she said “We should be working to bring down the level of rhetoric, the level of targeting of one another.”
[…]Ironically, Duckworth added later when asked about the political murders in Minnesota that “I represent everybody in the state of Illinois. We should be working to bring down the level of rhetoric, the level of targeting of one another. And that starts with every one of us that’s elected. But it also starts at the White House.”
Did Duckworth forget that four minutes earlier she called Trump a “tinpot dictator wannabe?” This classic example feeds into the left-wing biases the media has for elected officials who oppose their agenda.
Sauders returned for more narrative-pushing in a June 19 post:
The recent assassinations of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband have led the media to try to figure out a way to blame the Republican Party for it. On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe invited Michael Tomasky, to elaborate on the current state of political violence and stated that “the MAGA grip on the Republican Party, with its winking at violence” is the problem.
On Monday, Tomasky published an article titled, “America Is at a Terrifying Turning Point-and There’s No Going Back.” The motivation for his piece focused on the assassination that took place in Minnesota, Senator Padilla’s actions during Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference, and ICE handling the New York City mayoral candidate, Brad Lander.
[…]Tomasky later voiced that the people who experienced the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement knew it would end, but emphasized what is happening today feels “permanent.” To the left-wing media, the political violence today “feels worse” because they can blame it on the Republican Party.
Fondacaro came back for a June 19 hate-watch of “The View”:
Despite openly refusing to tone down their incendiary rhetoric against President Trump after two attempts to assassinate him, during Thursday’s episode, the liberal ladies of ABC’s The View clutched their pearls for far-left Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and claimed it was “irresponsible” for Trump to voice any criticism of her because it put her in “danger.”
Citing the assassination and attempted assassination of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers from over the weekend, co-host Sara Haines teed up Crockett to go off, asking: “Do you feel safe as an elected official in this political climate?”
Crockett proceeded to complain about the money spent on the security detail for both President Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court:
[…]To emphasize how real the danger members of Congress were facing, Crocket noted that “someone has been sending pizzas to members’ homes.”
It’s interesting that Crockett would bring up how disturbing it was to have people know where members of Congress lived. It was also supreme hypocrisy from The View cast to be appalled by it.
Fondacaro put only “ABC” in the headline pf his post, faslely suggesting that “The View” speaks for the entire network when he knows that is not the case.
Tim Graham spent his June 20 column grousing that the Minnesota shootings were called out by a fact-checker:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz can rant at a law-school commencement ceremony that ICE is “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” and no one pounces on the Nazi smears.
You can put “Hitler” in the search engine at PolitiFact and you won’t find them ever doing a fact check that says “Trump is not a carbon copy of Hitler” or “our immigration law enforcement personnel are not the Gestapo.”
However, on June 18, PolitiFact’s Madison Czopek was throwing flags on Walz’s behalf after the horrific assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home. The Patriot Oasis X account was ruled “False” that “Governor Tim Walz has DELETED every post he made praising Minnesota (assassin) Vance Boelter.”
This built on a June 15 piece where Czopek took after “conservative X accounts” that linked Walz to Boelter: “We found no evidence that Walz and Boelter were closely acquainted, nor any evidence that Walz was in any way linked to the shootings.”
In between those two posts, Czopek threw a “Pants On Fire” flag at Sen. Mike Lee for a “Based Mike Lee” X post that wise-cracked about the Hortman killing: “”This is what happens (w)hen Marxists don’t get their way.” Lee later took this down.
Put aside for a second whether everything Czopek checked was “Pants On Fire.” Clearly, her hair was on fire to defend Tim Walz and the Democrats.
Yes, Graham is trying to dismiss Lee’s vicious hatred as mere “wise-cracking.” He also didn’t mention that his employer is no stranger to smearing others as Nazis, such as its frequent smearing of online critics as “digital blackshirts.”
Alex Christy played his own version of the Walz distraction in a June 21 post:
If one were only to watch Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour, they would come away with the impression that “rotten” political rhetoric is mainly a right-wing phenomenon. Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart went so far as to claim Republicans are afraid “of being human” on the matter.
The background for the conversation was President Trump announcing he wasn’t going to call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after Democratic State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated. Host Geoff Bennett had pointed out Trump called Walz “whacked out” but didn’t mention other instances of Walz calling Trump a “tyrant,” “cruel,” and urging Democrats to be “meaner.”
It would be one thing to say Trump should rise above it, but Bennett should have at least provided some context. As it was, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru warned, “There’s another element of this. On the one hand, you have got this political rhetoric, which I do think both sides, but disproportionately the president, has gotten rotten. But you have also got a lot of untreated mental illness in this country. And it’s that reaction of those two things that is causing this threat level to rise.
Clay Waters used a June 22 post to push the distraction, as well as downplaying Lee’s vicious tweets:
On Friday’s edition of Amanpour & Co. on PBS, host Christiane Amanpour introduced journalist Hari Sreenivasan’s segment with UC-San Diego professor and self-styled extremism expert Barbara Walter. Despite a spate of recent left-wing violence — from burning Tesla and Waymo cars by anti-Musk and anti-ICE rioters, to the anti-Semitic killings and fire-bombings, the focus was almost entirely on blaming the Republican Party for the violent surge.
[…]Sreenivasan blamed Republicans for political violence both past and future, turning a couple of deleted X posts by Utah Sen. Mike Lee riffing on the horrific political murder of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, into a harbinger of future terror.
[…]Walter actually praised Lee for retracting those statements but kept the blame on Republicans for fostering an atmosphere where “violence starts to be normalized,” stating “You don’t want progressive policies in your state, you don’t want the Democrats in power, and you’re being told for — from your political leaders that violence is potentially justified.”
Offensively, Sreenivasan wondered why Republicans still had to kill even when they were winning elections.
Waters then whined that “Walter still blamed the GOP for stirring up violence among the American public, ‘….The January 6th insurrectionists, they’ve watched them be pardoned.'” He did not prove Walter wrong.
That was pretty much the end of the MRC’s coverage of the Minnesota shootings. Note that none of these MRC writers explicitly condemned the shootings.