Melissa Koenig at the New York Post reported that two male journalists stationed outside the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington D.C. were caught on an open mic cracking jokes about Donald Trump being assassinated like John F. Kennedy. Whose journalists were they? Were they merely camera operators? Are they just DC locals, or are they national? Will they be punished for this loose talk?
Trump sat in court to hear his attorneys argue that he should be immune from charges in connection with his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss and the January 6 riot because he was not impeached and convicted for those things.
These comments are worse by degree than say, reporter David Chalian, who was fired by Yahoo News after being caught on an open mic in 2012 saying the Romneys didn't care about New Orleans residents being hit by Hurricane Isaac as the Republican convention opened in Tampa. “They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.”
At the beginning, you might think when they talk about getting a "good shot," they're talking about a camera shot, but then the done darkens quickly.
“You know what the worst part is? Even if he has his window open and he’s hanging out of it, he will be on the other side of the street,” one person could be heard saying on the live feed from the Associated Press.
“I mean, if he’s driving, we’ve got a good shot,” the second reporter said hopefully, to which the first replied: “Yeah, if he’s driving with the front window open.”…
“Yeah, or if it’s a convertible,” the second person said.
“Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that,” replied the first.
“Yeah, like if he just pulls up —” the second started to say before the first interjected and asked: “Like JFK?”
“Maybe someone, just like they told JFK, ‘You know what you should do? You should take a convertible! It’s so nice out,’” the media member continued, to laughter from his cohorts.
What's galling is the double standard. If journalists were joking about Obama or Biden being assassinated, the Left would want them exposed and fired, and maybe banned from polite society altogether. But the idea of assassinating Republicans is grounds for dark humor or even movie treatments.
In 2006, CNN rolled out the red carpet to add their "buzz" to the "creative" documentary Death of a President, imagining the assassination of President George W. Bush because of his "war on terror." No movie maker of CNN journalist was punished for mulling over this thought exercise in public.
