MSNBC Apologizes for Pundit’s ‘Inappropriate, Insensitive’ Remarks About Charlie Kirk By Haley Strack
MSNBC has apologized for “inappropriate, insensitive” comments made on air about Charlie Kirk in the immediate aftermath of his assassination.
During a segment with Katy Tur, guest Matthew Dowd called Kirk one of the most “divisive” figures who “is constantly pushing hate speech.”
“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said. (He also said, before Kirk’s death was confirmed, “We don’t know any of the full details of this yet — we don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration.”)
On Wednesday evening, MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued a statement condemning his comments:
During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.
Dowd’s statement, though, was hardly the only troublesome treatment of the Charlie Kirk shooting in the media. Even Tur’s comments were out of place: She worried on air that the Trump administration would use Kirk’s assassination as “justification” for further crackdowns on crime. “After one of the DOGE employees was allegedly attacked in Washington, D.C., that’s what Donald Trump used as justification to send federal troops into Washington, D.C., to get things under control — the carjacking situation, he used that. And I know it’s hard to predict the future, but you can imagine the administration using this as a justification for something,” she said.
Charlie Kirk was at Utah Valley University on Wednesday as part of his American Comeback campus tour. Kirk set up a table, as he does at his campus events, and invited students to come forward, ask questions, and prove his opinions wrong. The hellish tragedy that then unfolded was caught on video: Kirk was asked a question about transgender shooters, and when he began to answer, he was shot in the neck.
Democrats, Republicans, media pundits, and the hundreds of thousands of Kirk’s followers who watched the scene have, for the most part, been unified in condemning the attack. But some directed their ire at the wrong target.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said in response to Kirk’s murder that Donald Trump’s rhetoric has “fomented” political violence and that January 6 “tripped a new era” of political violence.
A New York Times obituary (“Charlie Kirk Right-Wing Force and a Close Trump Ally, Dies at 31”) of Kirk called him “a fixture in the Trumpian media sphere” who “tweeted relentlessly with a brash right-wing spin, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay and Black people. Even some conservatives found his approach distasteful.” The obituary also described Kirk as “so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies — he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was ‘100 percent effective’ in treating the virus, which it is not — that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020.”
The Times‘ obituary desk employed harsher words for Kirk than for Hamas founding member and October 7 mastermind Ismail Haniyeh, who died in July of last year. At the time, the Times described Haniyeh as a “politically savvy” leader, who “played a central role in Hamas’s evolution.”
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