Muddled Coverage in Wake of Kirk Murder

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcoming Bill de Agostino from the Media Research Center of
the program, Bill, I wanted to chat with you. Good morning,
by the way, welcome, Good to have you here. I
want to chat with you because you called attention to
something that we have chatted about in general in a
lot a lot over the previous years, and that is

(00:20):
the mainstream media's effect on the news and on voters.
And the specific example that you pointed out is having
to do with the Charlie Kirk assassin and a famous
incident where Jimmy Kimmel presented him in his commentary as

(00:41):
a MAGA type and then he was Kimmel suspended for
a couple of days, even though it was abundantly obvious
and blatantly apparent anybody that paid attention that this guy
was a left wing nut. And so what's interesting about
this to me is that voters and McLaughlin and an

(01:04):
associate's poll of a thousand people still believe less than
a quarter of them correctly described this this shooters as
a leftist. So what are we to make of this, Bill,
I mean, you have people with all of the news
and all of the facts available to them, still believing

(01:25):
something that's not true.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, I mean, it's not about the truth not being
available to them. The issue is that there's too much
else that is also available to them. There are so
many conflicting narratives being presented here, and a lot of
the corporate media coverage has been deliberately muddled to kind
of give give a false impression because I think that

(01:50):
they were They're uncomfortable admitting whenever their side commits political violence,
and so because of that, there was there was with
a lot of misleading. There was a lot of you know,
kind of begrudging half truths about about Tyler Robinson, the shooter,
and they actually very rarely truly acknowledged his left wing politics.

(02:15):
And then they of course quickly moved on to once
Kimmel was suspended, they moved on to basically just focusing
on Kimmel, and Charlie kind of became the background character
in the story of his own murder and in the
media's eyes at least. But yeah, I mean, I'll be honest,
the reason I wanted this poll was because I could

(02:36):
see I knew that there was going to be some
degree of people that were going to be believing some dumb,
insane theory about Tyler Robinson, but I had no idea
that the problem was going to be as bad as
it is. And I will note about twenty two percent
of respondents believed that he was Tyler Robinson was right wing,

(03:00):
which is insane, but also importantly twenty seven percent believed
that are sorry, not believed, but we're unaware of him
having any politics at all. That was actually the most
common result was I don't know.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
Well, this happens all the time though, right. That's kind
of what Jem and I have talked about over the years.
It's not exactly that the information is not available. It's
that you have whatever percentage of people they're busy with
their lives. If they turn on the news at all,
it might be for five minutes, and it's likely to

(03:36):
be one of the mainstream networks, and they see something
they say, oh, really, I didn't know that, and it's
not true, and then they go vote based on on
this erroneous information. It's really a dangerous place.

Speaker 2 (03:51):
Right, And it's important that you bring up voting in
that instant because I mean, access to correct information that
you're based in your voting decisions off of is basically
it's it's basically a vital necessity in a republic, right,
I mean, if you do not have an informed populace,

(04:11):
then any kind of democratic process that's playing out to
determine the direction of the country is going to be
a neatly flawed, right. And so the media know this,
and and that's that's why you could accurately describe this,
in my opinion, as basically deliberate election tampering. And of
course that's that's the main that's the real threat.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Of all of this.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
I mean, that's that's why we at m RC do
what we do.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Maybe maybe the greatest example bill is the Charlottesville case,
where where all of the all of the audio from
Donald Trump is readily available, and yet what's the percentage
of people that still believe that he said there are
good people on both sides, that he was referring to
the racist maniacs. No, he wasn't, okay, And if you

(04:58):
if you listen to what he said, is it's a
it's obvious that he wasn't. And yet people still believe that.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Oh yeah, probably probably the majority of people believe that.
I would suspect that even the majority of Republicans believe that.
I mean, it's it's been, it's been so deeply ingrained
in its basically just that the national zeitgeist. I guess
you could say it's uh, it's it's remarkable what they
get away with. And and the difficulty is stopping them

(05:26):
every time they do this kind of thing, right, because
I think that we've we've caught them out plenty of times, right,
and and kind of pushed back against a lot of
these narratives. But it's just it's such a steady, consistent
effort that inevitably some of their attempts get through. And
you can see how disastrous it is when they do, right,
when when some of these false narratives kind of forbade

(05:46):
the public consciousness.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, Bill, is it is at MRC dot org at
your website.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Uh, yeah, most of our most of our work is
published on NewsBusters, which is like the satellite group. But yeah,
m R m R C is our is our main organization.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
You can go there to read more. Bill, Thanks so much,
good to have you on. Appreciate the time.