According to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former President Donald Trump was dismayed at the cost of the funeral of Army Private Vanessa Guillen, a child of Mexican immigrants who was brutally murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. As Goldberg tells it, Trump raged, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” At 4:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday, Guillen’s sister Mayra tweeted the article was “hurtful & disrespectful,” that Trump showed the family nothing but respect, and that she voted for him. However, only 1 of 9 MSNBC stories on the article from the time off Mayra’s tweet through the end of Wednesday mentioned her rebuttal. CNN mentioned the rebuttal in more than half of their stories—6 of 10—but the amount of emphasis they put on it varied greatly.
Wow.
— Mayra Guillen (@mguilen_) October 22, 2024
I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics- hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members. President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today. https://t.co/o8cDrKOKBV
MSNBC
Deadline: White House host Nicolle Wallace quoted from the article before elaborating, “That's Donald Trump using the F word to describe a funeral that he had offered to pay for, for a member of the United States military. With 14 days to go, we apologize for the profanity but we want to quote Donald Trump accurately and be faithful to this extraordinary body of reporting.”
On All In, Chris Hayes ridiculed the campaign’s denial, “His campaign denied he made those comments. You can make up your own mind as to whether or not that sounds like something Donald Trump would say and do.” 
Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire welcomed Goldberg and asked him to “tell us, if we will, a little more about this story and what else it tells you and can tell us about how Trump does view those who have, at times, put their lives on the line in military service for this country.”
Goldberg claimed Trump’s public displays of empathy for the family were just for show “I mean, it's very typical in the sense that the story exhibits his racism because he had -- he used an expletive to describe this soldier who was a Mexican-American daughter of Mexican immigrants. It shows the parsimony. One of the triggering -- constantly triggering things in his life is the fear that he's being ripped off or robbed. So, in a meeting -- so he meets with the family on July 30th, 2020, and he performs fine, he performs well, he's very sympathetic or as sympathetic as he can evince be to the mother and sisters of this murdered soldier.”
Jansing also told Independent Americans host Paul Rieckhoff, “She was horribly murdered. And it's reduced to ‘an F-ing Mexican.’ Do you think that, with the larger community, used to be the military was sacred if you were a politician, right? And maybe even just with people who are part of the military family, it makes a difference when they hear that.”
Rieckhoff agreed, “To have Trump hit this story and this person in this way is especially egregious and outrageous and cuts to the core of who he is. This is outrageous and he has to be in charge of the most diverse military on the planet. How can we do that when he speaks about so many people in this country like that.”
Later, Katy Tur thought that if it rings true, it must be true, “NBC News has not confirmed the reporting and Donald Trump's campaign flatly denies all of the allegations. Still, Goldberg's reporting underscores what John Kelly is arguing about Donald Trump's character, what John Kelly said he witnessed.”
On his show, Jose-Diaz Balart was the only one to mention Mayra’s tweet and he only did so in the most casual way as he asked Alexi McCammond, “Guillen’s sister challenging that, Mark Meadows is denying the report. What do you see as the impact of this?
McCammond didn’t care, “I mean, it's just abhorrent. It's disgusting language. It's a disgusting racist sentiment from someone who was the former president and wants to be the president again. It speaks to the way he views women, women of color, people who died in this country while serving our country.”
CNN
While CNN was better than MSNBC, it was still downplayed. For example, Scott Jennings had to bring it up because The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer failed to do so, “Well, everybody involved in that, in that episode, people who were in the room, her family, I mean, everybody who was involved in this has said that didn't happen.”
Other instances included hosts casually bringing it up, just so Goldberg could try to debunk it. During The Source, Kaitlin Collins asked him on Tuesday, “what do you make of those denials?” 
Goldberg, as he did in the article itself, dismissed them, “I don't make much of them at all. The sister wasn't in the meeting. The lawyer for the family wasn't in the meeting.”
On Wednesday’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, Goldberg claimed that “I understand why they're hurt by this story, and I obviously feel very sorry, as we all do for this family. But the fact remains when the family visited Donald Trump, as I note in the story, he said kind words and offered to pay for the funeral. Five months later when the subject came up, he had very unkind things to say about the funeral and I would note, he didn’t pay for the funeral.”
Earlier in the day, Jim Acosta and Jeff Zeleny included quick little disclaimers as part of larger anti-Trump segments, the former’s including an interview with 2016 DNC speaker Khizr Khan.
The worst CNN offender was Laura Coates, who, before welcoming Khan to her program, opined, “’it doesn't cost 60,000 bucks to bury an effing Mexican’ unquote. I mean, just hearing and reading those words it's unimaginable that we're talking about a former president of the United States.”
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It was common that stories that omitted Mayra did mention that the Trump campaign and Mark Meadows have fiercely denied the allegations, but in a credibility contest between Trump and Goldberg, MSNBC and CNN viewers are going to go with the latter. However, the Guillen family is hard to dismiss as a bunch of unprincipled Trump hacks, which is why the decision to omit Mayra’s tweet is journalistic malpractice.
