Karoline Leavitt Blasts Liberal Media for Shameful Non-Coverage of Charlotte Train Killing

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not pull any punches during a press briefing on Tuesday as she lambasted the media for its shameful coverage – or lack thereof – regarding the brutal killing of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska last month. The blanket refusal of the corporate press to mention the heinous crime has become the latest example of how the media buries stories that don’t fit a left-wing ideological worldview.

“Perhaps most shamefully of all, the majority of the media, many outlets in this room, decided that her murder was not worth reporting on originally because it does not fit a preferred narrative,” Leavitt said to reporters before taking questions. “Many of the journalists in this room spilled plenty of ink trying to smear Daniel Penny for defending a subway car from a deranged lunatic in New York City, but none of those same reporters lift a finger to write stories about an actual murderer.”

The broadside was yet another example of a skill Leavitt has displayed quite a knack for over the course of her tenure as the mouthpiece of the White House – holding the media accountable for advancing a partisan agenda rather than honestly reporting the news.

As Leavitt alludes to, the corporate press had been virtually silent on the gruesome murder of Zarutska, who was killed on August 22 by Decarlos Brown, Jr., on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. Surveillance footage of the incident shows Zarutska sitting down on the train in front of Brown after a shift at a local pizza parlor. Moments later, Brown, a career criminal with 14 prior arrests, including for armed robbery and grand larceny, pulls out a knife and stabs her in the throat. He then calmly walks off the train and mutters, “I got that white girl,” with Zarutska’s blood dripping off his hands.

It’s easy to see why the media would like to pretend that the murder never happened: Zarutska was white, and her killer is black. Unlike the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or Michael Brown, this murder couldn’t be used to stoke racial tensions and push a narrative that America is systemically racist. Unlike Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, an illegal alien, domestic abuser, and suspected MS-13 gang member who received wall-to-wall sympathetic coverage, a legal Ukrainian immigrant couldn’t be used as a weapon against President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, and so her death was ignored.

If the media reported on this clear hate crime, where a black career criminal targeted a random white woman solely because she was white, then the left’s entire carefully constructed house of racial grievance cards might collapse. They might be forced to acknowledge uncomfortable truths, like the fact that, according to FBI data, black-on-white murders are more than twice as common as white-on-black murders, and that 90 percent of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Or the fact that a police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Moreover, the fact that Brown was on the train at all is a stinging indictment of Democrat soft-on-crime policies. Brown had just been arrested in January, but was released without having to post any bail. He only had to sign a document promising to return for his hearing. Brown didn’t even pay to be on the train that night – yet more evidence that punishing smaller crimes like fare evasion prevents more serious offenses.

Unsurprisingly, as various accounts on social media were quick to point out, weeks after the murder, it was effectively absent from any mainstream coverage. While search results on outlets like Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post returned hundreds or thousands of results for other racially charged murders, there was zero mention of Zarutska or Brown.

As the outrage over the lack of coverage continued to grow, however, these outlets were finally forced to acknowledge the killing – but in doing so, they only further debased themselves and showed why their readership is plummeting and trust in the mainstream press is at an all-time low.

Axios was the first to break the corporate media silence. Instead of simply reporting on the killing, they ran with this headline: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”

You read that right. According to this “unbiased” news outlet, the real story here isn’t the savage, random murder of an innocent person by a career criminal who should have been behind bars – it’s that “MAGA” is upset about it.

It only got worse from there. The article goes on to state that the killing “dominated conversation on Trump-friendly social media” and even more outrageously waves the crime away as “a visual counterpoint to statistics showing crime decreases.” Yes, even though we know for a fact that blue cities have been cooking the books on crime numbers for years, Axios wants us to shrug off Zarutska’s entirely preventable death.

As usual, the rest of the corporate press was quick to pile into the left-wing echo chamber. The New York Times ran a story titled “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right,” which astonishingly seemed to suggest that reporting on the crime would have made the Times akin to “newspapers in the Jim Crow era [which] often egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality.”

Politico, meanwhile, ignored even the pretense of talking about the crime itself, instead reporting that “President Donald Trump and MAGA allies are using the killing of Iryna Zarutska to attack Democrats.”

In light of this, Leavitt’s scolding of the media seems rather mild.

But what the liberal elites who run the legacy press don’t seem to understand is that ignoring stories they don’t like isn’t as effective a strategy for narrative control as it once was. With the advent of new media platforms like podcasts, independent journalists – and alternative outlets like AMAC Newsline – the cabal of mainstream newspapers and TV networks has lost a great deal of power.

That fact was made abundantly clear when the media was effectively cowed into reporting on the story. But even then, they only further undermined themselves by suggesting that anyone who is upset about Zarutska’s killing must be “MAGA.” If that’s the case, it’s no wonder Trump won in historic fashion last year.

Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.