(PatriotWise.com)- Howard Kurtz defended Fox News against accusations that it had a role in the racist shooting at a Buffalo grocery.
The suspected gunman, accused of murdering ten people and injuring three more, wrote an online rant. He accepted the “replacement theory,” a theory popularized by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson.
The incident was described as “utterly devastating” by Kurtz, who also highlighted that the suspect’s letter “reeks of bigotry, anti-Semitism, and a sick mentality.”
Kurtz said what he also finds problematic, and he’s been talking about it for decades, is the knee-jerk partisanship with which commentators and politicians on the left and right react to mass shootings. President Bill Clinton blamed Rush Limbaugh in part for the Oklahoma City tragedy. A mass massacre in Tucson was blamed by liberal commentators and subsequently The New York Times on a Sarah Palin political map that the perpetrator never viewed. When a leftist Bernie Sanders supporter, a Rachel Maddow devotee, shot and wounded Steve Scalise and others at a Republican congressional baseball practice five years ago, the media did not blame Maddow or left-wing ideology and they should not have.
According to Kurtz, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, and Chris Hayes all blamed Fox News commentary for the shooting.
Tucker Carlson has been one of the main targets. Now, his views on immigration and politics and those of everyone else on this network are open to public debate. However, blaming him for the shooting is ridiculous. It’s the most recent instance of a bloody-hands method of finger-pointing. Worth noting is that the suspect’s hundreds of meandering pages include no evidence that he has ever watched a single minute of Fox News.
Later, Kurtz invited fellow Fox News commentators Will Cain and Julie Banderas to address the network’s role in the attack.
The replacement notion is a “conspiracy theory,” according to Banderas, but blaming Fox for the shooting is “disgusting.”
Banderas also said that Democrats support illegal immigration for electoral reasons.
“The Democrats want illegal immigrants in our nation because they’re the ones who will eventually vote them into office,” she explained.
