The brazen murder of two young Israeli Embassy staffers in DC was committed by a man on the radical left, but other than Jake Tapper, none of TV network stars could identify the shooter as "left," let along "radical left." MRCTV's Justine Brooke Murray helps break it down.
Violence is the first defining stance of an extremist. But the TV networks didn’t just fail to say “far left,” they didn’t even say “left” or God forbid, “Progressive,” since murdering innocent people isn’t progress.
NewsBusters senior research analyst Bill D'Agostino found that 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 9 a.m. ET Friday. The only exception was Jake Tapper. 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."
Bill noted an energetic counter-spin from Lindsey Reiser, a host on CBS News’s streaming platform, who turned the violence around on Israel: “[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s critics blame his right-wing government for the anti-Israel climate that may have led to the shooting.”
Isn’t it weird that there is one marginalized minority that somehow doesn’t achieve Victim Status? Jews are apparently a category of White-Privileged Oppressor, even if all Jews aren’t white, any more than assuming all Muslims are brown.
The overwhelming irony of all this is that it doesn’t matter, once again, if you are a Jew or an Israeli or an American hippie, you’re not immune from being murdered. They don’t care about who you actually are, or what you actually believe. If you’re in their murder zone, they’re not doing pre-murder interviews.
I found it odd today that the New York Times didn’t even have an article on the shooter Elias Rodriguez in today’s paper. You can find one online, but it’s not in what we call the dead-tree edition. The Washington Post had one, but the Times did not. If the shooter was a Trump supporter, you'd never hear the end of it.
Don't look at TikTok for calm takes. Rebekah Jones, a convicted criminal and former Democrat congressional candidate from Florida, is celebrating the double murder. “Want to feel safe? Don’t commit a genocide,” she lectured the dead in a TikTok video. “Don’t work for people committing a genocide,” she continued, blaming Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim for their own murder because they worked for the Israeli embassy.
“There’s not one person in Gaza who feels safe,” preached Jones. All Jews who believe they have the right to self-determination in Israel apparently “perpetrate violence” by extension and “should never know peace either.”
Then there’s Guy Christensen, who has wrongly called his X account "Your Favorite Guy." He has a video headlined “Elias Rodriguez’s Act of Resistance Was Justified.” He called both shooting victims "war criminals" and defenders of genocide.
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