Breaking-news live coverage can get things wrong in the heat of the moment, but there’s no excuse for partisanship to break out. After the assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday, I was looking out for talk of the January 6 riot. It happened at about 9:16 on CBS, as anchor Margaret Brennan was talking to Samantha Vinograd, a former Obama official at the Department of Homeland Security (who became a CNN contributor before joining CBS).
Vinograd raised the prospect of “retaliatory violence” based on anger at vicious criticism of Donald Trump, called it “frankly unpatriotic” to tie this, for example, to President Biden who said on July 8 that “It’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.”
CBS wasn’t explicitly citing that, they blurred it into blaming “the government.” Vinograd then connected this notion to January 6 and the hammer attack on Paul…
