War on Terrorism

By and large, the news media remained calm, collected, and hesitant to speculate on Tuesday night following the terrorist attack in Manchester, England at the Ariana Grande concert. That being said, the evening was not without notable comments, including some from MSNBC’s All In host Chris Hayes.  

Early Monday evening as details of a loud explosion at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester England were first rolling in, something obviously very wrong as MSNBC’s chyron was reporting “at least 20 dead.” But for the network’s Law Enforcement Analyst Jim Cavanaugh on Hardball, the terrifying noise could have been anything, including a very loud balloon popping as he told host Chris Matthews. 

The ransomware cyberattack that wormed its way into at least 74 countries recently exposed new vulnerabilities in the UK's National Health Service (NHS), as if it weren't vulnerable enough. Hospital systems in England and Scotland were taken offline. Major operations were delayed, causing frustration and additional worry to patients who spoke to TV interviewers.

In a Tuesday post at the American Enterprise Institute's "AEI Ideas" blog, Marc Thiessen called out "The media hypocrisy over Trump’s intelligence leak." While acknowledging that the Trump-related leak, if true (very big if), would be "indeed a disaster" — though, as National Review's Andy McCarthy has noted, still within Trump's unreviewable authority" as President —Thiessen noted that the…

The showrunner of ABC’s Quantico said they would be “substituting Trump for terrorism” but in the May 5 episode, titled “RAINBOW,” they manage to combine both. A character with a name almost identical to real life President Trump supporter and tech mogul Peter Thiel is used in a terror plot to hijack airplanes using a money sharing app.

Forgiving a friend is one thing. Forgiving your spouse’s cold-blooded killer on a televised news program is another. After losing her husband, Naseem, in Egypt’s Palm Sunday bombings, Samira Fahmi had every reason to despise ISIS. The terrorist group not only took the life of her partner in church on a holy day, but killed or injured more than 100 others in her Coptic Christian community. 

As is almost always the case, signs of trouble preceded the latest shooting in Paris, which left one police officer dead and wounded two bystanders before police killed the gunman, later identified as French national Karim Cheurfi, a known criminal with a long, violent record. ISIS claimed to be behind the attack. According to police, a note praising ISIS fell out of Cheurfi's pocket when he fell…

Secretary of Defense James Mattis made a visit to Afghanistan Monday, where he and General John Nicholson stated that a top U.S. adversary was backing the Taliban. “9,000 U.S. troops are on the ground trying to help the Afghan army hold back a resurgent Taliban,” announced Anchor Scott Pelley during CBS Evening News, “But the job is getting tougher by the day thanks in part to Moscow.” The…

Levante la mano si usted pensó que Univision, entre todos los medios, sería la que desafiaría el protocolo mediático basado en la conciencia política y sería la más fáctica a la hora de cubrir las expresiones del asesino en Fresno tras su arresto. Asombrosamente, eso fue precisamente lo que ocurrió.

Amanda Taub’s “Interpreter” piece on the upcoming election in France, in Friday’s New York Times was snottily headlined “A Small French Town Infused With Us-vs.-Them Politics.” That town, Frejus, was no doubt also infused with current events, as suggested by the Times’ own lead story on Friday: “Gunman In Paris Shoots Officer; Terrorism Seen.” Taub managed to completely ignore that issue in favor…

Here’s a new item for the “Just When You Thought You’d Seen It All Department:” The left-wing Huffington Post website recently deleted a blog in which the author actually “fantasized about the deaths of Donald Trump supporters” because they “deserve to die more than I do.”

In the moments following President Trump’s Thursday press conference with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, MSNBC and its myirad of guests swiftly condemned Trump for referring to the deadly shooting in Paris on the Champs-Élysées as a terrorist attack. 

Appearing on MSNBC in the 3 p.m. ET hour on Thursday, during breaking news coverage of a shooting along the Champs Elysees in Paris, Daily Beast World News Editor Christopher Dickey was more worried by the prospect of France’s “very far-right party” using the incident as an issue in the nation’s upcoming presidential election than he was with the welfare of people caught up in the violence.