Fox Leads, CBS, CNN and MSNBC Mislead on Covering Daunte Wright's Record

April 15th, 2021 10:11 PM

On Wednesday, Fox News Channel again demonstrated that it's keeping people well-informed about important issues while other networks were spreading misinformation. At 6:07 am, Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade explained that the accidental shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Minnesota was a "tragedy," but he had a serious crime on his arrest warrant. 

 

KILMEADE: Daunte Wright -- everybody knows this is a tragedy. Nobody thinks he should have been shot. He got pulled over for something motor vehicle-related, but there was a warrant out for his arrest for attempted aggravated robbery after choking and holding a woman at gunpoint for $820 a year ago.

So if you pull somebody over -- if you want to debate whether somebody should be pulled over for an expired license or license plates, okay, have that debate -- but if you're the police officer, you run that background, and you find out it's an open warrant for something as serious as this, how do you not make an arrest?

While the more liberal media have been portraying police shooting victim Daunte Wright of Minnesota as having only a minor criminal record that did not justify attempting to arrest him in the first place, several Fox shows picked up on charges that he used a gun in 2019 to try to rob a woman of more than $800, reaching for the money in her bra. 

Ironically, just 10 minutes after Kilmeade, MSNBC contributor and former Democrat Senator Claire McCaskill, apparently unaware of the charges, claimed that Wright had not been accused of serious crimes like "armed robbery" that justified trying to take him into custody.

 

McCaskill went into a rant in defense of Wright: "I do think the shooting of the young man a few miles away a few days ago is really a gut check moment for police departments. Here's what's really sickening about this, Mika. You know why he had a warrant? He had a warrant because he didn't get a notice for a hearing."

As she continued, it was also ironic that McCaskill finally found a gun law that she opposes because of early reports that enforcing the state's permit requirement to possess a firearm contributed to Wright's death:

And you know what he was charged with? Carrying a gun without a permit in America. Are you kidding me? In most states, you don't even have to have a permit to carry a gun. So there's this thing that goes on where there are people in our communities that are being targeted by police officers and drug [sic] through a system that they never escape from. And it contributes to a cascading set of circumstances that hold them back in terms of their lives' opportunities.

But McCaskill has a history of pushing other gun control, and going on rants against Republicans for blocking Democrats on the issue. McCaskill concluded:

And this is a good example of that in this instance. This young man paid the ultimate price for that. And that is his death. And I do think that everybody in America is going, "Wait a minute, this wasn't an armed robber -- this wasn't a rapist -- this wasn't a murderer. This was a young man who wouldn't show up at court on a charge that, in most states, wouldn't even be against the law."

A couple of hours later on CBS This Morning, during an interview with liberal civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, he wrongly claimed "It was a misdemeanor warrant." King repeated the error: "It started with an expired tag, they found he had a misdemeanor, and it escalated into that."

On Thursday morning, New Day substitute host Poppy Harlow mentioned Wright being pulled over for expired tags, but not the armed-robbery record: 

HARLOW: When you get back to the root of what precipitated the deaths of all of these black men in America at the hands of the police, so many of them -- I mean, your son, Eric Garner from Staten Island not far from where I'm sitting now, was selling loose cigarettes. For Daunte Wright, it was expired tags. For George Floyd, it was a counterfeit $20 bill -- Alton Sterling, I could go on and on and on.

Her guest, Gwen Carr (the mother of Eric Garner), repeated that line. Then Harlow added: The CNN host recalled her own harmless experience of being stopped for expired tags: "Well, I've said this before on this program, but, look, I've been pulled over for expired tags, right? And the outcome was completely different."

MSNBC's propaganda supporting the left was sponsored in part by Noom. The deceptive episode on CNN was sponsored in part by Clear Choice. Let them know how you feel about them funding such misinformation.