from NewsBusters:
Dayton Shooter – Radical Leftist
As NewsBusters research analyst Bill D’Agostino exposed Tuesday afternoon, the liberal broadcast networks were doing their best to avoid telling their viewers that the gunman behind the Dayton mass shooting was an admitted ‘leftist.’ But hours later, ABC’s World News Tonight was the first flagship network news program to break that trend when they footnoted that fact.
Meanwhile, the flagship CBS and NBC newscasts were still avoiding it like the plague.
ABC correspondent and weekend Good Morning America co-host Eva Pilgrim reported that “as authorities search for a motive, the FBI now investigating evidence they say shows [the shooter] was exploring violent ideologies.”
“ABC News has also learned of a now-deleted Twitter account believed to be linked to [the shooter], describing himself as an ‘anime fan’, a ‘metalhead’, and a ‘leftist,’” she added a short time later, reading from the shooter’s Twitter bio.
In contrast, CBS and NBC seemed hell-bent on running away as fast as they can and then hide from the fact that the FBI discovered he followed “violent ideologies.”
At no point during the segment on the CBS Evening News did anchor Norah O’Donnell or correspondent Dean Reynolds report that the Dayton shooter subscribed to “violent ideologies.” The closest they came to admitting it was this soundbite from the Dayton police chief: