Ali Frick at Think Progress has a very interesting piece about Bill O’Reilly’s dismissive attitude toward the terrorist shooting incident at the Holocaust Museum yesterday (emphasis in original):
Last week, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly went on a tirade against CNN for supposedly failing to cover the shooting of Pvt. William Long, an Army recruiter in Arkansas. Of course, O’Reilly’s claims were blatantly false — but that didn’t stop him from claiming to be “shocked” that he “can’t find any information about” the shooting in the mainstream media.
Exactly one week later, after a white supremacist shot and killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, O’Reilly never covered the shooting on his show. In fact, the only mention of the act of domestic terrorism came in a segment that, ironically, decried the media’s inadequate coverage of Long’s death:
O’REILLY: But the central question remains according to a new Pew study, the American media spent far more time on the murder of Tiller than on the murder of Private Long. … 10 to 1 the Pew study which was released yesterday, 10 to 1 more coverage. I mean, come on, come on.
[…]
O’REILLY: All right. Now, we had a murder today at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
HENICAN: That was an awful case. Awful.
O’REILLY: Now, this is an 89-year-old anti-Semite bigot kills an innocent guy in the Holocaust Museum. OK? Now, what about the newsworthiness of this? … Is it as newsworthy as Private Long?
Additionally, Frick points out that Fox News in general has been either ignoring or downplaying yesterday’s attack.
The obvious question is why? Normally, far right news outlets like Fox would be all over stories about terrorist incidents that involve specifically Jewish targets.
Could it be that Fox’s outrage over anti-Semitic attacks has more to do with the ethnicity of the attacker than the ethnicity of the victim?
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