The Media Aggressively Plays Dumb on the Liberal Hate of Kirk's Killer

Tim Graham on Sep 17, 2025

Once the shock of Charlie Kirk's murder began to wear off, it became easier to notice how today's "news" media routinely fail to live up to their own pompous prattle about their work. They don't "hold people accountable," they don't "uphold democracy," and they aren't "independent" or "objective." They don't produce "news" as much as narrative.

You can see this in their energetic declarations that you couldn't possibly ascribe a leftist motive to Kirk's shooter ... and even claimed you shouldn't try. The story was going in an "unhelpful" direction, so it should be upended.

On CNN's weekend show "Table for Five," national security analyst Juliette Kayyem demanded we all "stop looking" for a motive. The former Obama official yelled at GOP strategist Lance Trover: "The point is, who cares? A man was killed, and you have yet to say political violence is bad. Period."

"Who cares?" What kind of callous person can't imagine why this man's grieving family and friends need to know why this senseless crime happened?

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," co-host Jonathan Lemire admonished Republicans for pointing fingers at the left: "There's so little we know yet about this shooter and his motives. And again, they almost shouldn't matter because what happened here, it's a culture, a society where we've had this rise in political violence. We are awash in guns."

Motive "almost shouldn't matter"? This makes journalists sound like they're anti-journalism. It's like they're saying, "Who is rudely asking questions and seeking out answers?"

On "CBS Evening News Plus," anchorman John Dickerson was aggressively playing dumb: "Five days after Charlie Kirk's murder, the shooter's motive remains elusive. No writings left behind. Vague, secondhand testimony."

That's not true. By Friday, we had the suspect Tyler Robinson in custody, and we learned the bullet casings had messages including "Hey fascist! Catch!" Another referred to a song "Bella Ciao," which celebrated the end of Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. But somehow these geniuses can't figure out this man was targeting "fascists," which is the media's common label for President Donald Trump and his followers.

One man who's not pretending to be dumb is Jimmy Kimmel, who claimed on Monday night: "We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them." Kimmel, the "comedian," baldly and shamelessly stated the polar-opposite of the truth.

Even after the prosecutor laid out the evidence -- and John Dickerson acknowledged reality, that it was no longer vague and secondhand information -- Juliette Kayyem went on CNN still claiming the motive "may be unanswerable" to people who care about violence like she does. Robinson's ideological motive somehow "does not explain the violence."

On MSNBC, former FBI agent Chris O'Leary stayed clueless, claiming the killer had a "salad bar ideology," nothing identifiable: "It's certainly a motive, but is it necessarily clearly an ideology and part of a broader, you know, movement and political violence or terrorism? ... It probably wouldn't get us there."

These purveyors of willful ignorance clearly want to absolve the left of any responsibility for inspiring violence. They want the freedom to decry MAGA "fascists" who are "existential threats to democracy." No one should say that could inspire kooks to hurt someone.

But Jim Acosta routinely moaned on CNN that Trump calling them "Fake News" was going to lead to "a dead journalist on the side of the highway." You can't connect violence to rhetoric -- unless the rhetoric is coming from conservatives. If these media people didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.