The Media Research Center’s first, bizarre reaction to the attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump is to rage at the media for … reporting only what it knew in the immediate aftermath. Joseph Vazquez ranted in a July 13 post:
Despite everyone with functioning brains witnessing that an apparent assassination attempt just occurred on former President Donald Trump’s life on video, CNN instead ran a headline making it seem like he tripped. Yes, you read that right.
“Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally,” read CNN’s grotesque headline after video surfaced of gunshots going off and appearing to graze Trump’s right ear during a Pennsylvania campaign rally. CNN didn’t stop there but proceeded to run with that narrative and didn’t even mention the possibility of gun shots in the original article: “Secret Service agents rushed former President Donald Trump off the stage after he fell to the ground amid loud bangs at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) wrote in a scathing rebuke of CNN’s coverage, “Absolute ghouls.”
In fact, CNN even had the temerity to include the gaslighting of one CNN reporter who spun the shots as possible fireworks: “‘We heard a bunch of … loud cracking noises. At first I thought: Is that fireworks? All of a sudden everyone started screaming,’ said CNN’s Alayna Treene, who was reporting from the rally.”
What’s even worse was that CNN even noted that there was “blood” on Trump’s face in its “What we’re covering” section, but still couldn’t bring itself to concede that a probable assassination attempt just occurred and instead downplayed it: “[D]etails on what exactly happened remain sparse.”
NBC News’ initial headline on the horrifying event was no better: “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after popping noises heard at his Pennsylvania rally.” And over at The Associated Press, readers were left with this barking mad spin in a post on X: “BREAKING: Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd.”
But as Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin wrote, the right-wingers bashing the media for not immediately jumping to conclusions (like Vazquez) don’t understand how responsible reporting in a breaking news event works:
The media learns information incrementally, and publishes what it can confirm. That’s why in the aftermath of the shooting, initial reports brought news of the popping sounds, the blood dripping down Trump’s face, the mad dash to the SUV.
In these kinds of news environments, the best practice for the press is to report what it knows. Often, media critics of limited imagination condemn the press for not reporting what they believe it should assume. It might feel good to see a headline advance your preferred view of what happened, but playing fast and loose with the proven facts serves only to erode the bond of trust between the media and the reader.
All of these news outlets that drew fury for that early reporting quickly updated their stories or published new ones describing the shooting faithfully and in great detail. Indeed, the AP headline above that inspired a critic to label the outlet “disgusting” and “unbelievably mendacious” was soon changed from “Donald Trump has been escorted off the stage by Secret Service during a rally after loud noises ring out in the crowd,” to “Trump injured but ‘fine’ after attempted assassination at rally, shooter and one attendee are dead.”
[…]A media that exercises restraint is a good media. It often fails to live up to that standard, but the argument that it should be more reckless in its coverage, not less, is one that will lead to worse, not better reporting.
The Washington Post similarly defended media caution against partisan right-wing haters:
Breaking stories, of course, require the kind of caution USA Today displayed. Not all of the central facts had yet been confirmed by authorities at the time the article was first posted.
“If you heard ‘loud pops,’ that’s all you can say,” said Tom Jones, the daily media columnist for the Poynter Report. “To say more than that, without knowing what it was, would have been incredibly irresponsible. … When dealing with something as critically important as this, you cannot be wrong.”
Vazquez, meanwhile, refused to admit that the media updated their reports on the shooting as more information became available — which would seem to be an act of media malfeasance on his part.
That demand for baseless speculation from the media continued in a post the same day from Jorge Bonilla, who was mad that a news anchor factually stated that “we don’t know what the motivation was” behind the shooting:
Tonight we heard, from NBC’s Lester Holt, the kind of papering over of a shocking act normally reserved for the initial outset of an Islamist terror attack: a declaration of ignorance over the motive that could’ve possibly possessed the individual to do such a thing, to wit: attempt to murder former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
[…]It is true that there isn’t a granular, specific, underlying idea as to why this shooter climbed up a ladder and onto a roof and attempted to assassinate the former President of the United States. But the motive was clearly to assassinate the former President of the United States. If an al-Qaeda or ISIS terrorist decides to drive a van through a pedestrian thoroughfare, we don’t ponder what may have possessed this “troubled youth” to undertake such a task.
The evil in men’s hearts is what possesses them to do these things, just as an evil man took a rifle to a baseball field and nearly killed Congressman Steve Scalise. And, as we did at the time, it will become necessary to examine the rhetoric that incited the Pennsylvania shooter into acting on the evil within him. Because if there is in place an ecosystem, in media and online, devoted to advancing the idea Trump is Literally Hitler and must be stopped at all costs, over and over again, then eventually someone is going to take it upon themselves to rid the world of Literally Hitler.
That, Mr, Holt, is ultimately what the “motivation” was.
So does that mean if someone opens fire on the offices of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, we can immediately blame the MRC because it played the Literally Hitler card by calling the group “digital brownshirts“? Good to know. Also, Bonilla is being disingenuous; determining the shooter’s specific motivation is very much the point, and as with the reporting immediately after the shooting, he doesn’t understand that it’s journalistically responsible not to speculate — but he wants that speculation anyway because it reflects well on his preferred candidate.
Tim Graham regurgitated all this in his July 16 podcast:
Donald Trump was shot in the ear on Saturday night, and the networks tried to be calm. But the opening was messy. The first bumbled headline at CNN.com was “Secret Service Rushes Trump Off Stage After He Falls at Rally.” Other headlines didn’t say “shot,” just that Trump was rushed off stage after “popping noises.”
NBC anchor Lester Holt strangely insisted no one knew the shooter’s motive. But wait — we do know the shooter wanted to kill Trump.
He too didn’t seem to want to admit that the initial reporting was updated as more facts became available.
Ultimately, Bonilla, Graham and Vazquez are cynically seeking to exploit Trump’s shooting for partisan political ends that further their employer’s anti-media narratives. That would make them, not the media, the real “ghouls.”