The cynicism of blaming the media for the Trump assassination attempt

On Saturday—shortly after a gunman attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania and killed Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter—various observers remarked that a photo of a blood-smeared Trump, his fist raised as Secret Service agents scrambled him off the stage, was instantly iconic, and one for the history books. But this wasn’t quite right. Not because the clichés about the photo’s historical import were wrong; it’s hard to describe, but my instinctive reaction was as if I were looking at something from a high school textbook, not something that had just happened. The observation was wrong because it was photos, plural.

There was one by Evan Vucci, of the Associated Press, of Trump with his mouth open, and another by Vucci of Trump with his lips pursed. There was one by Doug Mills, of the New York Times, showing Trump’s face screwed up in a ball, and another depicting a far more ambiguous expression. The Washington Post’s Jabin Botsford captured Trump’s fist rising from the tight scrum of agents encircling him; Getty’s Anna Moneymaker captured Trump’s bloodied ear through the scrum but also a shot of Trump’s body to the camera, two buttons undone. Each photo—and others besides—depicted the same scene but with different emphases. “As tough as he looked in that one picture with his fist looking very defiant, the next frame I took, he looked completely drained,” Mills recalled afterward. That each photo was taken under the very real threat of gunfire only makes them more remarkable. “I can’t go back in time and get a redo,” Vucci told the Daily Beast. “You’re just making sure that your composition is good and you’re making the images that you need to make.”

It wasn’t just photojournalists who were on the scene trying to document what had happened, though they may have been closest; print, TV, and radio journalists were there, too, and could also conceivably have been in harm’s way. Gary O’Donoghue, of the BBC, filmed a dispatch while lying on the ground; later, he spoke with a bystander who claimed that he had seen the gunman scaling a nearby building and tried to alert law enforcement, an interview that quickly went viral online. NBC’s Dasha Burns noted that she and her team “spent hours speaking to witnesses…exchanging our stories, hearing their stories, trying to fill in the blanks.” 

Burns also reported that, 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.”

Still, the accusations of media complicity in the Trump shooting have perhaps come at a uniquely difficult moment for the mainstream American press, which has been dealing not only with years of media-bashing on the part of Trump and his allies (as well as occasional physical violence) but also, as I wrote recently, widespread financial decline and a palpable (and understandable) sense of disorientation in the face of this toxic political moment. While not at all equivalent to the worst of Trump’s anti-media rhetoric, many allies and supporters of President Biden have recently been sharply critical of parts of the press, too, over their coverage of his age. At an event on Friday, Biden said that “the press” has been “hammering me” while giving Trump a “free pass,” and many of those present booed—a disconcerting sight, even if Biden urged them to stop and described reporters present as “good guys and women.”

Also on Friday, before the Trump shooting, The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang wrote a widely shared column, headlined “Joe Biden’s cynical turn against the press,” that captured many of the same feelings. The press is currently being blamed “both for protecting Biden and for harming him,” and for not focusing sufficiently on Trump, having previously been accused of obsessing over him, Kang wrote—and yet “the news media doesn’t have anywhere near the level of influence that much of this criticism implies.” (If it did, he argued, its critics would be afraid of attacking it.) I’d quibble with aspects of Kang’s column—as I see it, the critiques he references around Biden and Trump aren’t as contradictory as they might appear, and media criticism on the whole remains a vital democratic pursuit—but his invocation of powerlessness struck a chord. At this fraught moment, it can feel like we’re a convenient punching bag one minute, only to be sidelined—or at least drowned out—the next.

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). Either way, much of the invective was inappropriate and incoherent. There has of course been overheated media coverage of Trump, but covering his threats to democracy is not overheated in and of itself, and “the media” is a very big place. Some of the critics seemed to be accusing journalists of being both overly reckless and, at least in their coverage of the shooting’s immediate aftermath, overly cautious (even if that’s not what they thought they were criticizing).

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; one even made its way to the top of a Trump-endorsed crowdfunder for victims of the shooting that, as of this morning, had raised the best part of four million dollars. And, despite the aggression of some rally attendees toward members of the press, not every media story out of the event attested to a caricature of mutual hatred. As Burns and others noted, reporters and witnesses to the shooting swapped accounts; at least one person present spread mainstream news reporting on the day’s events by word of mouth; both Cai and Pindell attested to offering water to attendees in the sweltering heat, one of whom later checked that Cai was okay.

For his part, Mills, the veteran Times photographer, told his paper afterward that he’d “never been in a more horrific scene.” He continued, “There were a lot of members of his staff backstage crying, I got lots of hugs all just saying, ‘I’m so glad we’re OK.’”