The Media Research Center continued its flirtation with race-baiting with a Sept. 9 post by Curtis Houck grousing that non-right-wing media weren’t relentlessly hyping a certain crime story:
Despite having only each covered it once Monday, ABC and CBS were back Tuesday to ignoring video released in the brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina, omitting it from their flagship morning shows, ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS Mornings.
This return to a bias by omission came after Monday’s CBS Mornings broke the blackout on the lead broadcast network newscasts of this bloody, horrifying, and unprovoked attack while ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News arrived on scene later in the day.
[…]This leaves the total network coverage of the murder at just under six and a half minutes between ABC, CBS, and NBC, a paltry number compared to, say, the Daniel Penny case or even the Epstein files.
Bill D’Agostino raged that the non-right-wing media focused on how Republicans pounced on the story:
The corporate media have finally been shamed into covering the brutal stabbing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zaruska by a mentally ill black man in Charlotte, and predictably, they’ve turned it into a “Republicans pounce!” story. In between gasps of horror that the Trump administration has “seized on” the story, print outlets and TV talking heads have been hard at work identifying the real culprit of the gruesome murder: insufficient public health funding.
[…]This story matters because it exists at an intersection between two major political topics that have long dominated policy discourse in the America. Iryna Zaruska, a Ukrainian refugee, came to this country seeking safety from the death and destruction wrought by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — only to be done in by a violent felon who was released onto America’s streets by a social justice ideologue.
Which is to say: the story matters to right-wing media like the MRC because it pushes a pro-Trump anti-crime narrative. He also didn’t dispute the fact that right-wing media has been obsessed by the story; the security video of the stabbing hyped by right-wing media featured a scary black man attacking a white woman, but D’Agostino managed to avoid bringing up that part. And if non-right-wing media is “ghoulish” for pointing out that Republicans did indeed pounce on the story, are not D’Agostino and right-wing media similiarly ghoulish to exploit Zaruska’s death to peddle a partisan narrative?
As if on cue, Nicholas Fondacaro touted a member of a right-wing media outlet taking part in that very exploitation:
As NewsBusters has found, the liberal media were on the side of violent crime and murder as they when from ignoring a cold-blooded act of murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zaruska on Charlotte, North Carolina light rail to making it a ‘Republicans pounce’ story. On Monday night’s On Balance, NewsNation host Leland Vittert unloaded on the liberal media for intentionally not giving Zaruska the same kind of attention they paid to drug addict George Floyd.
“America, is it a George Floyd moment. Not about policing, but about crime,” Vittert proclaimed at the top of his show. “That video remember five years Floyd’s death. It changed how we talked about policing. This video has every reason to change the way we talk about crime.”
[…]“For Progressives and their friends in the media, they think that crime isn’t the criminals fault. Crime is somehow the fault of a racist country,” Vittert called out their lunacy.
Fondacaro didn’t disclose Vittert’s right-wing leanings — he was a former Fox News personality, after all — which further showed Republicans pouncing on the stoyry But he probably didn’t need to since Vittert’s rant made that bias all too clear.
Jorge Bonilla groused:
The horrendous murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zarutska aboard a Charlotte, North Carolina light rail has taken a significant turn for the worse, with the release of video showing Zarutzka’s heartbreaking final moments. But the legacy media appear to be already running away from an inconvenient story.
ABC World News Tonight devoted a scant 16 seconds to this story:
[…]This story is only getting worse, inasmuch as it exposes the downsides of years of liberal policies. Today’s reporting indicates that the legacy media want to get as far away from it as possible[.]
Bonilla offered no evidence to back up his conspiracy theory.
Tim Graham used his Sept. 10 column to tout a book on “toxic empathy” by right-winger Allie Beth Stuckey:
In the days after the article, Stuckey found toxic empathy in the people who felt sorry for the vicious killer of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte. The killer was a minority. She tweeted: “This animal was arrested and released a dozen times in the name of social justice and racial equity. Social justice and racial equity policies are borne out of ‘empathy’ for the ‘marginalized.’”
Empathy should flow plentifully to the victim and her family, and not the killer. If the killer showed remorse and asked for forgiveness, that could change. But it’s toxic in the aftermath of a senseless attack to ignore the murder victim and bemoan a “system.”
This is the outlet that insisted Donald Trump was a victim because he faced consequences for his behavior and insisted that parents who hate their transgender children are victims because their hate was called out, so maybe Graham’s definition of “toxic empathy” is more than a little skewed.