Following the shocking assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump on Saturday, the biggest story aside from the incident itself has been the corporate media’s appallingly unprofessional reaction to it – ranging from downplaying the attack that left one innocent bystander dead and two more seriously injured to outright blaming Trump for the attack.
In the hectic moments after the shooting, liberal outlets did everything they could to distract from the gravity of the situation, incredibly still criticizing Trump as he was bleeding from the head and had come just fractions of an inch from certain death. Although many of the most nauseating headlines have since been altered or deleted entirely, screenshots captured and posted online confirm the media’s callousness and blinding hatred toward the former president.
NBC News in its initial report described the shooting as merely an “incident,” writing that Trump “could be seen clutching his ear after popping noises were heard.” The Washington Post reported, “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally.” The Associated Press ran with the narrative that Trump was “escorted off the stage” after “loud noises” rang out in the crowd, while The Hill preferred the slightly more specific “loud bangs.”
Local papers, notorious for their blatant political bias, also got in on the competition to muddy the waters. The Indianapolis Star reported that Trump was “removed from the stage” after “loud noises startle[d] former president, crowd.” The Detroit Free Press wrote only that Trump was “bloodied at Pennsylvania rally.”
But perhaps the most despicable performance came from CNN, which, in a move rivaled only by the network’s “fiery but mostly peaceful” debacle in 2020, chose this headline: “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.”
Not to be outdone by the network’s digital reporting division, CNN reporter Jamie Gangel openly criticized Trump on air just minutes after he had been shot for pumping a fist in the air and appearing to say, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to the crowd. “That’s not the message that we want to being sending right now. We want to tamp it down,” Gangel said – never mind the fact that CNN has spent years explicitly comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler.
As more details began to emerge, other networks also avoided any self-reflection and continued to lecture Trump and other Republicans about “turning down the temperature.”
On CBS, Margaret Brennan outrageously claimed that the “biggest threat” following the attack was from “retaliatory violence” by right-wingers – right before resorting to tired left-wing talking points about January 6. Brennan later lectured House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who was shot by a deranged Bernie Sanders supporter in 2017, about instructing Republicans to “rein in some of the rhetoric,” and then went after Trump himself for supposedly not doing enough – after he had just been shot – to “lower the temperature.”
In a new twist on the old liberal habit of “Blame America First,” both Politico and Axios — sites providing DC journalists their daily talking points – ran headlines – “Can America turn the Temperature Down” and “America Plays With Fire” – that insinuated that the country and the American people were somehow at fault. Along with calling for “a national lowering of the rhetorical temperature,” and blasting supposedly “incendiary remarks” from Republican lawmakers, Politico lamented “rising violence that has become America’s political reality.” Axios, meanwhile, also admonished Republicans for demanding answers on security failures and declared “America plays with fire,” apparently washing its hands of any responsibility.
ABC’s Martha Raddatz – infamous for her near-hysterical election-night meltdown while covering Trump’s 2016 victory – appeared to implicitly blame Trump by referencing the now thoroughly debunked “bloodbath” hoax as a possible cause of the shooting, while also urging viewers to “remember January 6.”
Prominent Trump critic David Frum went a step further in a piece for The Atlantic, writing, “The bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well… Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.”
Even after more details emerged, confirming that a gunman had indeed tried to assassinate the former president and killed one bystander in the process, a firefighter who heroically used his body to shield his family from the bullets, most media outlets conspicuously continued to avoid the “a” word, lest they illicit some sympathy for Trump. For its Sunday morning print edition, The New York Times cropped out the American flag in the now famous photo of Trump with a defiant fist in the air, running with the headline “Trump Hurt, But Safe, After a Shooting.”
The Denver Post was even more obscure on the front page of its Sunday edition: “Gunman Dies in Attack,” the paper reported.
Perhaps more than any other single event since Trump entered the political scene, the assassination attempt against him has exposed the media’s utter inability to remain objective or even halfway decent in their coverage of him. Along with evincing a stunning lack of awareness about how their own efforts to demonize the former president may have encouraged violence against him, the corporate press has still reflexively insisted on spinning the shooting into a reason to criticize Trump.
As three distinguished professors and astute political observers have written in the wake of the tragedy, the media’s culpability in fomenting the violence is inescapable.
Victor Davis Hanson lamented the left-wing “assassination porn” that has proliferated in the media in recent months. “The left constantly makes Trump an exception,” he wrote. “Now, it is as if the imagined killing of Trump had been mainstreamed and become acceptable in a way inconceivable of other presidents.”
In another opinion piece for The Hill, law professor Jonathan Turley argues that the attempt on Trump’s life “was not nearly as surprising as it should have been.”
“Some of us have been saying for years that this rage rhetoric [against Trump] is a dangerous political pitch for the nation,” Turley continued “While most people reject the hyperbolic claims, others take them as true. They believe that homosexuals are going to be ‘disappeared’ as claimed on ABC’s ‘The View’ or that the Trump ‘death squads’ are now green lighted by a conservative Supreme Court, as claimed by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.”
Turley goes on to detail various other instances where media personalities and celebrities have fantasized on air about killing Trump, all while Democrat politicians applauded in the background – including Joe Biden, who just days ago insisted that it was time to put a “bullseye” on Trump.
“These days, almost every Democratic politician and media surrogate tells the American people regularly that Donald Trump and the Republicans are ‘an existential threat’ or a ‘threat to our democracy,’” David Deavel added on Sunday for AMAC Newsline, pointing to the recent cover of The New Republic depicting Trump as Hitler as a prime example of the media-created climate of hatred around him. “The claim that Donald Trump is a fascist, a Nazi, or a would-be Hitler might seem ridiculous and even funny,” he continues, were it not for the attempt on his life that left another man dead.
In the weeks and months ahead, there will surely be a long-overdue conversation about the media’s unprecedented and ultimately un-American treatment of the former president over the better part of the past decade.
But equally important should be a discussion about the further collapse in public trust in the media moving forward, particularly when it comes to learning more about how a shooter managed to come within a few centimeters of assassinating a presumptive presidential nominee.
After the reaction of corporate media outlets to the shooting itself, it’s fair to ask if the American people have any reason to trust them on any information related to the incident (or anything else for that matter) – including important questions about the ability of Biden’s Department of Justice to conduct an objective and transparent investigation.
At the very least, those few remaining souls who may have still believed in the honesty and the integrity of our media establishment no longer have any excuse for their naivete.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
