There aren’t a lot of facts. There are, however, an avalanche of conclusions.
So it goes in many corners of the news media and among its frequent commentators in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
Authorities haven’t established why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate the former president — and, now that the gunman is dead, may never know. That hasn’t stopped media figures and politicians from robust speculation. President Joe Biden, Democrats and left-leaning media have all been blamed, with no proof. Then there’s the ever-popular, amorphous, definition-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder target — “they.”
“They tried to incarcerate him, now they tried to assassinate him,” said Jacob Chaffetz, a Fox News contributor.
Taken together, it’s a reflection of what breaking-news coverage in a modern media world was built for — drawing sharp lines, leaning into epic stories, leaving little room for middle ground or sometimes even the truth.
Some of the assertions have been specific. “The Republican district attorney in Butler County, Pa., should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” U.S. Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia wrote on social media. “The Democrats and the media are to blame for every drop of blood,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance posted, two days before being selected as Trump’s running mate. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Talk show host Erick Erickson blamed MSNBC. “These people have wanted Donald Trump assassinated,” he said on his radio show. “You can’t tell me they haven’t.” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said that “the Democrats have been inviting this for quite some time.”
Many news organizations have reported clues surrounding attempted assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks — party registration, political donations, lawn signs at his home — but refrained from drawing conclusions.
For many politicians and opinionated media figures, there’s little incentive for restraint, said Nicole Hemmer, a political historian at Vanderbilt University and author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.”
“Because there is so much competition in the world of right-wing radio and podcasts, the pressure to be the loudest and most over-the-top and angriest voice is even higher than it was in an earlier era,” Hemmer said.
They’re serving a specific audience, and “they don’t believe there will be forgiveness among that target audience if they don’t super-serve them,” said Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, a trade publication for political talk shows.
Blaming Democrats, Hemmer said, also blunts that party’s line of attack against Trump in the current presidential campaign — accusing the Republican of inciting political violence in the past, like before the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Following the assassination attempt, Biden has called for greater unity and for cooling down political rhetoric. But the president was left vulnerable following his debate with Trump, when he told donors that it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye” for untrue statements onstage. The choice of phrase sounds damning in retrospect, and Biden told NBC’s Lester Holt on Monday that saying it was a mistake.
Speculative rhetoric in the wake of tragedy is neither new nor one-sided. Right-wing media and political figures were quick to be excoriated following the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. The New York Times apologized and was later sued for libel for falsely tying to the Giffords shooting a map put out by former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that put Democratic-controlled congressional districts in electoral crosshairs.
Anger toward mainstream or liberal media figures has been palpable following the Trump shooting; one supporter at the Pennsylvania rally held a middle finger at television cameras watching Trump being hustled away by Secret Service agents.
Feeding that anger is easy — and, for some news operations, lucrative. There are few guardrails against indulging in such speculation, Hemmer said.
“The only effective guardrail is lawsuits with major damages,” she said, like Fox News faced before settling with Dominion Voting Systems about claims made following the 2020 presidential election, or jury verdicts against Alex Jones for his false claims about the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.
But those cases involved very specific accusations, not a general statement of “you caused this,” Hemmer said.
“They don’t need to be specific,” she said. “All you need is the ‘they’ and that does all the work.”
Politicians are more apt to join in blame and speculation than they did in the past because the ones who do it successfully, like Greene, have used it to raise money, Hemmer said. Party leaders have less power to stop them because the threat of withholding campaign donations is becoming more toothless, she said.
“The media and politicians definitely buttress one another,” Hemmer said. “More than that, the lines between the two roles have eroded so much that it’s not a surprise to see office-holders and media personalities saying the same things.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://twitter.com/dbauder
