Critics call out CNN and MSNBC's primetime silence on Chicago mass shooting: 'screaming headlines' any other time
Liberal networks 'have become state TV for the resistance,' Chris Barron says
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The mass shooting that took place outside of a Chicago funeral home on Tuesday was oddly left unmentioned by all the primetime hosts on CNN and MSNBC for two nights in a row – and critics think the liberal networks are avoiding news that contradicts their agendas.
“The press is doing everything they can to conceal chaos. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a mass shooting at a funeral in Chicago, attacks on police across the nation or riots in Portland. They clearly think actual news helps Trump’s law-and-order narrative, so they go silent,” Media Research Center vice president Dan Gainor told Fox News.
Viewers of both networks were kept in the dark on Tuesday night's breaking news of a dramatic gang-related shootout that left at least 14 injured as it began to unfold. Fox News was the only network to air the live press conference from the Chicago police addressing the mass shooting.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}CNN, MSNBC IGNORE BREAKING NEWS OF CHICAGO MASS SHOOTING AS IT UNFOLDS
“What’s amazing is that any other time they’d have screaming headlines about a mass shooting. But since they think it might help Trump, they don’t cover it,” Gainor added. “When the anti-gun news media don’t hype a shooting, you know they are hiding the truth for a reason.”
Perhaps more stunning, however, was Wednesday night's overwhelming coverage the hosts of CNN and MSNBC dedicated to President Trump's "surge" of federal officers he plans on sending to major cities, including Chicago, to quell the violence but made no mention of the shooting that rocked the Windy City.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“CNN and MSNBC have become state tv for the resistance. They cherry pick what news to cover and what they ignore."
“CNN and MSNBC have become state TV for the resistance. They cherry-pick what news to cover and what they ignore. Their commitment is to the narrative, facts be damned,” conservative strategist Chris Barron told Fox News.
CNN's John Berman, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon, as well as MSNBC's Ali Velshi and Lawrence O'Donnell, addressed Trump's order of deploying agents into cites without mentioning the Chicago shooting on Wednesday. MSNBC's Rachel Maddow avoided both subjects altogether.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Columnist and podcast host Tim Young believes the "horrible mass shooting in Chicago clearly doesn't fit MSNBC and CNN's agendas” on two separate fronts.
"First, they won't bring it up as it pertains to gun control, because Chicago has some of the strictest gun laws in the country – the shooting increases there show that criminals will find guns and murder no matter how many laws against guns you have in place,” Young told Fox News.
“Second, those networks clearly only care about Black lives when police shoot them, not when their lives are lost every day due to horrible crime rates and unsafe conditions in major Democrat-run cities,” Young added.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Lemon even interviewed Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Wednesday and pressed her on the rise of violence in her city and her contentious relationship with the president, but did not specifically mention the funeral home shooting.
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Earlier this month, when actor Terry Crews brought up a recent surge in shootings, CNN’s Don Lemon famously declared that the Black Lives Matter movement is about police brutality, not gun violence in Black communities.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“Black Lives Matter is about police brutality and about criminal justice,” Lemon insisted. “It’s not about what happens in communities when it comes to crime. People who live near each other, Black people, kill each other. Same as Whites... it happens in every, single neighborhood.”