Broadcast networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS still have yet to utter a single word about the radical left-wing politics of the man who allegedly gunned down two Israeli embassy employees on Wednesday evening in Washington D.C. In the first 24 hours after the attack, across their live-streaming and flagship morning and evening news programs, all of these networks, as well as MSNBC, stubbornly concealed both the shooter’s political leanings — including his membership with the radical left-wing Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) — from their audiences.
MRC analysts looked at all news coverage on left-leaning cable (CNN and MSNBC) and broadcast networks from 6:00 a.m. ET on Thursday through 8:59 a.m. ET Friday. Across all six channels, the only anchor, guest, or reporter to admit the alleged shooter was “left-wing” (or any similar terminology; see below for all search terms) was CNN’s Jake Tapper. Nobody else on CNN, let alone on MSNBC or any of the broadcast networks, cared to tie the attack to the political left.
Likewise, both the broadcast networks and MSNBC have completely hidden the alleged perpetrator’s PSL membership, once again making CNN the only network that even came close to doing its job of reporting the news.
During the 5:00 p.m. ET hour of CNN’s The Lead on Thursday, Tapper remarked that one of the victims, Sarah Milgrim, had been killed “by somebody far-left.”
Later in the segment, he added:
After the Tree of Life, the Tree of Life synagogue killing, there was a raft, including that, of antisemitic violence from people who were on the right. And it seems like right now, we are in the middle, in the midst of antisemitic violence from people who are on the left.
The alleged killer’s affiliation with the PSL was brought up only once, by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on Thursday morning’s CNN News Central: “The ADL Center on Extremism monitors extremist groups, like the Party of Socialism and Liberation, or PSL, that this man was associated with. That is an anti-capitalist, anti-western, and anti-zionist group that regularly employs antisemitic rhetoric.”
But even Greenblatt (who is himself a hardcore left-winger) was reluctant to tie the political left to this politically-motivated attack by a leftist. “Look, there are extremists on all sides,” he hedged.
Though the talking heads on Thursday were very careful not to utter the phrase “left-wing,” they were more than eager to drag the political right into the conversation.
Disgraced former FBI employee-turned-CNN commentator Andrew McCabe adopted the same mealy-mouthed, “both sides are to blame” angle as Greenblatt, remarking on CNN that political violence was the fault of “all kinds of different extremists, be they right, left, in the middle, or wherever else.”
Later that evening on the same network, host Abby Phillip did more of the same:
What happened last night was evil and terrible, and that’s not a topic of political debate. It’s not a topic of left or right, or you’re on this side or you’re on that side. It’s just wrong. It’s just bad.
Shoe-on-the-other-foot comparisons are beyond pointless when it comes to the media, but just for fun, imagine Phillip or any other CNN host talking like this if the shooter had turned out to be a right-wing nutjob.
Lindsey Reiser, a host on CBS News’s streaming platform, was quick to mention: “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s critics blame his right-wing government for the anti-Israel climate that may have led to the shooting.”
And over on MSNBC, international correspondent Matt Bradley sneered: “It didn’t take long for politicians here in Israel, particularly on the right-wing of the spectrum, to use this incident as a cudgel with which to beat their political opponents.”
As the Democratic Party’s base careens further leftward, apparently their friends in TV news are concerned that accurately reporting this story might only further damage their favorite political party’s public image. But as recent polls of trust in the media have shown, this sort of gatekeeping tends to come at the cost of the corporate press’s own credibility.
Research for this study was done with SnapStream and Nexis keyword searches for all political labels containing the words “left” (e.g. leftist, left-wing, far-left, the left), “progressive,” and “liberal,” as well as all instances of the terms “socialist,” “socialism,” and “liberation.” The search encompassed all broadcasts and transcripts on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC between 7:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, May 22 and 8:59 a.m. ET on Friday, May 23.
