Leading media networks that acknowledged what was clearly a domestic terrorist attack in Georgia on Sunday avoided implicating the left by not making any reference to their radical counterparts. According to Newsbusters, although a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Tom Jurgens, participated in the violence and was among those arrested, three major networks ignored that fact. The underwhelming coverage by CBS Evening News, ABC’s World News Tonight, and NBC Nightly News impressed upon viewers that the Georgia incident was not severely threatening, with one even suggesting that there may have been a reason for such an attack.
The domestic terrorist attack happened on Sunday in Atlanta, Georgia where “a group of radical leftists violently attacked police at the construction site of [a] law enforcement training facility throwing Molotov cocktails, large rocks, and other items in the latest attempt by the so-called ‘Stop Cop City’ movement.” Since it was not possible for CBS, ABC, or NBC to ignore the violent attack on the police, they did their best to “downplay the violence.”
According to Newsbusters, “much like their morning show, CBS Evening News only gave it a paltry 24 seconds during a news brief before anchor Norah O’Donnell turned to the weather in California. Meanwhile, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News each spent full segments on the group of far-left criminals attacking police, neither network labeled them as far-left, leftists, or any ideological label that they would stick on conservatives if they acted in this manner.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is claiming that Jurgens was only present as a “legal observer” and that the attack was a reaction to the actions of police who the SPLC said were using “policing tactics against protestors and observers” who oppose the construction of the police training facility.
According to the SPLC, they are a nonprofit organization that monitors “the activities of domestic hate groups and other extremists – including the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi movement, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, antigovernment militias, Christian Identity adherents and others.”
The radical left has a long history of domestic terror attacks, and this is just the latest. With the popular SPLC seemingly attached to and in defense of the incident, left-leaning networks who appear to support the organization had no other choice but to exclude their involvement as violent images replayed over televisions across America. The bias in their reporting has a significant impact on the perception of the attack, leading viewers to possibly determine that such action would not receive severe disapproval if it were to happen again.