TV reporters on cable and broadcast news networks are blaming President Trump for the two mass shootings that occurred over the weekend, with some even accusing the him of “promoting” racial violence.
Watch: TV media declare President Trump responsible for the El Paso shooting
MSNBC’s Morning Joe opened with a rambling monologue from the show’s titular host, Joe Scarborough, about the President’s supposed culpability:
It doesn’t take a great imagination. In fact, it take s a great deal of denial on the part of any Donald Trump supporter, to not hear this continued hateful language, to not hear the continued warnings from people saying this will lead to violences, and then to try to pretend that what happened in El Paso wasn’t connected directly to the hate speech of Donald J. Trump.
Hours later on that same network, MSNBC Live host Stephanie Ruhle asked Senator Klobuchar (D-MN): “Do you tie any any of the President’s rhetoric to these tragedies?”
Viewers heard the same tune on CNN’s New Day, where co-host John Berman pointed an accusatory finger at the the President. During an interview with former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, Berman challenged: “As a supporter of the President, when you see the language that he uses, in this document written by the killer, how does it make you feel?”
The President’s speech that morning did little to quell the fury of CNN senior political reporter Nia Malika Henderson, who alleged during the 10:00 am EDT hour of CNN Newsroom: “If you’re a white supremacist, you find the President’s words possibly inspirational, possibly comforting.”
Minutes later, CNN senior White House correspondent Pamela Brown alleged that the President’s language was “fanning the flames” of racial hatred. During a report from the White House lawn, she asked pensively: “The question is, does the President have any acknowledgment of the role his rhetoric as the President of the United States might play?”
Broadcast networks were no less accusatory. On Sunday’s Good Morning America, ABC chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl insisted: “This is gonna be something that he is going to have to answer for.”
In the lead-up to the President’s speech addressing the shootings, CBS correspondent Weijia Jiang wondered aloud how Trump would “respond to those claims that he is to blame for what happened in El Paso.”
Since Sunday, supposedly objective reporters have framed the President’s supposed culpability as established fact. If these members of the press truly believe that the President’s rhetoric is responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocents, one wonders how they would like us to assess their own rhetoric about him and his administration.
