Media Research Center founder and president L. Brent Bozell spoke in the strongest terms Thursday about the need for the media to denounce and fire journalists joking about assassinating Donald Trump like John F. Kennedy was shot dead in 1963.
The comments by journalists yet to be identified were caught on an open mic outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington, DC while Trump was inside.
“Maybe someone, just like they told JFK, ‘You know what you should do? You should take a convertible! It’s so nice out," one of them joked as people laughed.
EXCLUSIVE: MRC's @BrentBozell calls on Joe Biden and leftist media outlets to denounce the journalists caught talking about assassinating President Trump.
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) January 11, 2024
The culprits must be fired. Rhetoric like this is dangerous and someone's going to get hurt. pic.twitter.com/gCUqVi1S8Z
Bozell insisted:
Making jokes about assassinating a president is no laughing matter. But in today's highly charged world, it is flat-out dangerous. When you make it acceptable to joke about assassinations, someone will eventually act on it.
Bozell reminded people of James Hodgkinson, the Bernie Sanders volunteer who shot at a softball practice of House Republicans in 2018, nearly killing Congressman Steve Scalise, as well as Nicholas Roske, arrested in 2022 (armed with a pistol) near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The MRC president asked how the media would react if a conservative comedian held up a bloody fake head of Joe Biden, as Kathy Griffin did with Donald Trump in the summer of 2017. At around the same time, a Shakespeare theatre company produced a modernized version of the play Julius Caesar, with Trump playing the leader who was stabbed to death. Liberals praised these things.
Bozell called on President Biden to denounce these jokes, since he speaks of Donald Trump in frightening terms as the end of democracy. In today's violent world, it's not hard to imagine that people might attempt violence toward Trump if he's described as a mortal threat.
