The cynicism of blaming the media for the Trump assassination attempt

in the wake of the shooting, some rallygoers got “heated” with reporters in the press section. Sophia Cai, of Axios, heard cries of “Fake news! This is your fault!…You’re next! Your time is coming.” James Pindell, of the Boston Globe, reported seeing middle fingers everywhere. “For a moment, it felt like a growing mob,” he wrote. “I was separated by a temporary steel fence, but that wouldn’t help much if things turned violent.” He took off his press credentials, packed up, and texted his family to tell them he was okay.

It wasn’t just attendees at the rally who blamed the news media for the assassination attempt on Trump—online, various right-wing politicians and pundits did likewise, sometimes citing press coverage of Trump as a threat to democracy, even before anything at all was known about the shooter’s motives. J.D. Vance, a senator and leading contender to be Trump’s running mate, did not blame the media specifically but did pin responsibility on the Biden campaign and the narrative that Trump “is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs”; Tim Scott, another senator, accused the “corporate media” of having “aided and abetted” the shooting. The commentator Erick Erickson criticized MSNBC specifically for characterizing Trump as a “would-be dictator,” asking, “What did they think would happen?”; the congressman Chip Roy tweeted a New Republic cover depicting Trump as Hitler, adding, “You bastards.” In a series of tweets, the far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called “the media” “corrupt,” accused them of inciting violence, and said it was time to clean them up. Greene and others also criticized coverage from the immediate aftermath of the shooting that they clearly saw as whitewashing what had happened, including a CNN headline that, in part, described Trump as having fallen onstage. “Absolute ghouls,” Vance tweeted in response.

If this sort of reaction seemed telling of a uniquely dark American moment, the reality is, as ever, less exceptional. As far back as 1901, various observers fingered inflammatory newspaper writing as complicit in the assassination of President William McKinley; striking a slightly different note, some Democrats turned on Republicans in the wake of the JFK assassination, as Politico’s Jonathan Martin noted over the weekend. Our social media age undoubtedly eased and accelerated the sharing of recriminations and other forms of invective—not to mention false accusations and conspiracy theories—but the shooting and immediate reaction had very recent echoes, too, just not in America. As I reported in May, some allies of Robert Fico, the press-bashing prime minister of Slovakia, accused elements of the media of having blood on their hands after a gunman tried to assassinate him earlier this year (rhetoric that has since apparently morphed into a legislative clampdown on the press). Last week, Fico, who was seriously injured, returned to his duties and apologized to the “progressive liberal media and opposition” for having survived. Over the weekend, he weighed in on the Trump shooting. “It’s a carbon copy of the script,” he wrote. “Trump’s political opponents are trying to shut him down. When they fail, they incite the public until some poor guy takes up arms.”

But it’s important not to understate powers that the press does still have, including an enduring ability to set the agenda among political elites, even if many of them think they are reacting against it. And journalists can still get where others can’t and report their observations back to the world. For all the invective hurled at the press in its aftermath, the Trump assassination attempt was evidence of both of these trends—indeed, the invective was arguably exhibit A, whether those laundering it truly believe, as they claim, in the agenda-setting power of the media or were just using the idea to score cheap political points (or both).

And plenty of those right-wing critics were only too quick to tweet out the iconic images that the photographers at the rally—very much members of “the media”—risked their lives to capture.

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