MRC President David Bozell visited WMAL’s O’Connor & Company on Monday morning to discuss what the Sunday talk shows (and others) had to say about the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week.
O’Connor pointed out a major blind spot in the networks: a lack of someone who aligned with Charlie Kirk from an ideological perspective:
I’m talking about why don’t they put a Charlie Kirk on the payroll? Why don’t they hire a David Bozell to be one of their analysts? Who don’t they hire a Julie Gunlock or a Patrice Onwuka to be a paid analyst?
O’Connor had teed up the conversation by noting that Republicans “are the dominant political voice in America right now.” They control not just both houses of Congress and the White House but governors’ offices, state legislatures and even local offices.
Bozell responded by name-checking the regular suspects on these programs – none of whom even understand, let alone can explain, the conservative MAGA point of view. Bozell pointed out that when they do try to “diversify” their panel, they bring on people such as Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldbert who do not share the MAGA point of view and have no interest in explaining it to balance out the leftist attacks.
Bozell also pointed out that the New York Times was wrong to criticize President Trump for saying the shooter was a radical leftist and that the criminal indictment would include information that would address these questions. The president, he said, is not exactly speculating about the case prosecutors are building.
“I think he’s going to be proven correct that this guy has been radicalized, either by his school, by online gaming platforms or by his roommate,” Bozell said. “...They’re trying to say ‘Oh well, never mind that they were in a homosexual relationship or that their partner may or may not have been transitioning. He’s cooperative. He’s a nice guy. I mean, he’s 100% cooperative, so it must mean that he had nothing to do with it. The indictment will explain a lot of this.”
This refusal to treat the other half of the country as a legitimate political voice created its own set of problems for the left. Some who gleefully cheered the death of Kirk or criticized his work found themselves out of a job as their embarrassed companies scrambled to limit the damage. Perhaps never having seen any respect given views that opposed theirs, they assumed they could be as crass about Charlie Kirk as they wanted without penalty.
One such journalist was Matthew Dowd, who was fired by MSNBC after appearing to suggest Kirk’s words justified his death.
“I was asked throughout that day should Matthew Dowd be fired,” Bozell said in the interview. “And once he apologized, Ithought I would channel my inner Charlie. Charlie would have accepted the apology and forgiven him and moved on. I almost wish MSNBC had done the same, given Matthew Dowd an opportunity to remedy his comments on the air, on camera.”
Dowd’s apology notwithstanding, Bozell said not to expect much improvement from the media in how it handles these stories. He said the TV hosts tried not to inflame too much, aside from Martha Raddatz trying to get Gov. Cox to denounce Donald Trump yesterday. But that’s on camera.
Off camera but online, it’s a different picture, he said. “A Washington Post reporter basically saying the same thing that Matthew Dowd suggested, that Charlie had it coming,” Bozell said. “These guys are going off online but off camera to speak truth to power, as it were. They despised Charlie Kirk. They despised that he was successful. They despised that he had a following.”
Bozell also explained that Kirk had inspired his own work. “I think I can speak confidently for nearly everyone in the conservative movement,” Bozell said. “I wish I had done everything Charlie did as well as Charlie did it. I wish I had started a conservative operation as well as Charlie did. I wish I could be as prolific a fundraiser as Charlie was. I wish I could debate as well as Charlie did. He had a talent stack, a skill stack that was one of a kind, and he will be sorely missed.”
