One Year After Butler, It's Important to Remember That We Don't Hate the Media NEARLY Enough

I was on vacation on July 13, 2024. I remember sitting on the shore of the lake I visit every summer, enjoying a beer, while my dog eagerly begged me to throw the tennis ball for him just one more time (it's always just one more time), when my phone blew up with notifications about shots being fired at Donald Trump's rally in Butler, Pa.

I also remember all of the Twitchy editors and freelancers scrambling to get the breaking news up. I didn't have my laptop with me, so I wasn't able to write about the events at the time, but the DMs between all of the Twitchy writers were furiously flying back and forth.

One other thing stands out in my memory. I told one of my relatives (a die-hard liberal) what was happening, and as soon as we found out that Trump was safe, he looked at me and said, 'Trump just won the election.'

It was a tumultuous few campaign months following the assassination attempt (to say the least), but he was right. Despite the switcheroo the Democrats pulled on American voters, regardless of all the debates and everything else that ensued, the election was probably over the moment Trump stood up, face bloodied, surrounded by Secret Service, and defiantly raised his fist in the air, shouting to his supporters, 'Fight! Fight! Fight!'

A year later, it occurs to me that something else was probably decided that day.

Flashback: ABC’s Stephanopoulos and Raddatz blame Trump for the assassination attempt in Butler.

Unfreakingreal looking back on this:

“President Trump and his supporters have contributed to this violent rhetoric."

“Well absolutely, George.”

*Lists the bloodbath hoax and J6* pic.twitter.com/J6kVyKujiX
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) July 13, 2025

CNN was no better, reporting that Trump 'fell.'

CNN actually published this pic.twitter.com/Oj93vy28K3
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 13, 2025

Perhaps the worst of all was The Sunday Denver Post.

You will never hate the media enough. pic.twitter.com/eu9WAlPNZi
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) July 13, 2025

Honestly, I still cannot believe that was a real headline and not something out of The Babylon Bee.

Of course, if you ask any of them today, they will say that they were just being careful not to get ahead of the facts.

As if anyone buys that from the legacy media that currently laments the arrests of 'Maryland men' and 'fathers' and 'grandmothers,' neglecting to wait to find out that all of them are criminals, ON TOP of their crime of illegal immigration.

But they are doing it. They are trying to change history.

It still pisses me off that people portray reporters trying to be careful in the minutes after a chaotic news event as a conspiracy. These headlines appeared minutes, not hours, after the shooting and it was entirely plausible reporters didn’t yet know what happened. https://t.co/z2AzQ3IZWT
— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) July 13, 2025

Specifically people who would be the first to lambaste the media for leaping to conclusions and making mistakes.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 13, 2025

This is just laughable. We all know EXACTLY what the media was doing that day. They were already trying to downplay the entire incident. Because they knew what even my relative knew. Trump likely won the election that day, and that simply could not stand with them.

None of these news outlets came out later and apologized for their malpractice. Because they didn't get it wrong due to the 'chaos.' They got it wrong because they wanted to. And when that didn't work, they tried to memory hole the whole thing.

Remember the armies of reporters that news networks sent to Florida for the 2000 recount? Or to look through Sarah Palin's trash eight years later? Why have they not dispatched these same hordes to get to the bottom of the assassination? Or learn everything they could about Thomas Matthew Crooks?

Because they didn't and don't care. And that's at best.

At worst, they -- like many leftist 'influencers' on social media -- were sorry it was unsuccessful.

I can't believe I just wrote those words, but that is who the media has become. That is what they've done to themselves. I think the worst of them because that's what they have earned.

I am not old enough to remember the JFK assassination, but I was told about it by my parents and grandparents. Americans were united in horror at what happened in Dallas.

I am old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was shot. Even with a left-leaning media in the 80s, trying to kill a President was still the water's edge, where politics ended. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and every other major media outlet covered the shooting factually and honestly. They didn't try to push a narrative. (Yes, some of that came later, but it wasn't in most of the initial news coverage.)

But in 2025, that media no longer exists. It has been replaced by partisanship so reprehensible, they even try to dismiss an assassin who came within a fraction of an inch of killing the 47th President of the United States.

I've gone through several emotions on this one-year anniversary. I am filled with gratitude for the grace of God that caused President Trump to move his head ever so slightly just as the bullet was about to strike. I am also filled with grief and mourning for firefighter Corey Comperatore and his family.

But I would be lying if I didn't admit that I am also filled with revulsion at the media.

I write about media malpractice nearly every day for Twitchy. But some things are just beyond the pale. The media's coverage of Butler (and, frankly, their coverage of that and the second assassination attempt every day since then) more than qualifies.

Elon Musk was correct in declaring the death of the legacy media; he just got the date wrong.

It wasn't on November 5.

The media died, by their own hand, on July 13, 2024.