The suspect ASKED for Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi….
This was NO random crime attack….
As was Jan. 6?
This was a political assault….
But thge Right leaning Fox talking heads sought to politically dance around the situation it appears….
Shortly after noon Friday, as reporters scrambled to learn more about the horrifying assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul, at their home in San Francisco, Fox News aired a panel discussion in which the attack was a central topic….
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So Fox’s panel — and in particular, Fox Business correspondent Jackie DeAngelis — filled the vacuum with speculation. Speculation that aged very badly, very quickly….
“We’re waiting to find out what the motivation was. But there are two things that we could have on our hands here.”“A crime situation that just happened more randomly or with some motivation but wasn’t really targeted at the Pelosis per se. That shines a light on what’s happening not only in San Francisco, but all these other cities.”
As soon as you find yourself saying we’re waiting to learn what happened, but, it’s worth taking a pause. It is quite natural for people to quickly form opinions about things happening in the world. It is, however, very different to then offer those opinions to a live television audience. Though again, in this case it was revealing.
So what are the two options for what occurred, per DeAngelis?
Well, the first is that the attack was an example of random violence. And this, she argues, ties into the narrative that the network on which she was appearing has been energetically promoting: that Democratic cities are hives of precisely that sort of crime. There’s no pause to acknowledge that any individual incident is not necessarily representative of broader trends in crime because Fox has repeatedly given primacy to isolated incidents over broader data. Violent crime is up in San Francisco this year, about 8 percent. (Homicide is down very slightly.) But DeAngelis doesn’t offer this incident as a point to that end; rather, she frames this one attack as being reflective of what’s happening in “all these other cities.”…
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Where DeAngelis landed, though, is precisely where you’d expect a Fox commentator to land. If it wasn’t politically motivated, it’s because of the crime wave and therefore the Democrats’ fault. If it was, it’s because Biden didn’t unite America … and therefore the Democrats’ fault.
A simple, effective formula.