Trump Blamed for Death of Reporters...Did Media Blame Obama for Cop Killers?

By Larry Elder A man with a long-standing beef against the Annapolis Maryland newspaper Capital Gazette entered the papers headquarters with a shotgun and murdered five staffers. It represents the deadliest attack on U.S. reporters in modern history. Before learning about the suspects mental issues and his long-standing feud with the newspaper some in the media blamed President Donald Trump. After all critics said Trump routinely denounces fake news as an existential threat to our republic. Connect the dots they said. Blame Trump! CNN aired a montage of Trumps attacks on the media. Rob Cox a Reuters editor tweeted: This is what happens when @RealDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands Mr. President. Another reporter who later resigned even falsely tweeted that the shooter was wearing a MAGA cap. How do you get that wrong? How dare the President call out the anti-Republican media for its decades of biased reporting? Pew Research in 2013 found that only 7 percent of reporters called themselves Republican. How dare Trump attack The New York Times which has not endorsed a Republican presidential candidate since 1956? How dare Trump go after The Washington Post which has never endorsed a Republican presidential candidate. And how dare Trump refer to CNN -- one of whose news anchors Don Lemon has called Trump a racist - as fake news. Did the media hold President Barack Obama responsible for the murders of 10 cops in Dallas Baton Rouge and New York City all at the hands of black men apparently incited by their belief that cops murder blacks without consequence? After all Obama frequently criticized the police and bemoaned Americas racism as part of our DNA. President Obamas anti-cop rhetoric started right after he took office. Obamas friend a black Harvard professor was arrested in his home. Professor Henry Louis Gates back from a trip couldnt open his front door and reportedly asked his driver to help. A neighbor observing two people trying to force open the front door of Gates home called 911. But when the cops arrived and asked Gates to exit the home so he could determine its ownership Gates mouthed off and was briefly arrested. Obama said The Cambridge police acted stupidly. The Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association and the Cambridge Police commissioner insisted the officer followed protocol. Obamas statement infuriated officers all across the country and set up a template for the Obama administration: Cops engage in unlawful anti-black racial profiling. Obama and his attorney general also offered verbal support to the so-called Black Lives Matter movement that argues without facts that blacks are regularly and illegally profiled by an institutionally systemically and structurally racist criminal justice system. It did not help that during the first six years of the Obama administration the anti-police incendiary Rev. Al Sharpton according to The Washington Post visited the White House 72 times. What kind of message did that send to the police? When a Sanford Florida neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman shot and killed a black 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin President Obama promptly sided with the deceased teen saying If I had a son hed look like Trayvon. A jury found Zimmerman not guilty and one juror later said that during the deliberations race never came up. Then theres Ferguson. A grim President Obama at an address before the United Nations said: In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson Missouri - where a young man was killed and a community was divided. So yes we have our own racial and ethnic tensions. But the Ferguson grand jury did not indict the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown and a Department of Justice report exonerated the cop. Contrary to the lies told by his friend who witnessed the shooting Michael Brown did not have his hands up when the officer shot and killed him. Brown did not say Hands up. Dont shoot. Yet before the investigation even began Obamas BFF Sharpton took to the streets of Ferguson yelling No justice no peace. The DOJs investigation of Fergusons nearly all-white police department criticized its alleged institutional racism. But its actual findings do not support that conclusion. Ferguson the investigation noted is 67 percent black but 85 percent of its traffic stops involve black drivers. To the DOJ this 18-point statistical imbalance equals systemic racism. But in New York City where the department consists mostly officers of color 55 percent of traffic stops involve a black driver in a city with a 25 percent black population. This is a 30-point statistical imbalance. Wouldnt this make the NYPD even more institutionally racist than the Ferguson PD? Trump say the media has created an atmosphere that puts reporters in danger. Obama often unfairly criticized the police. But the media did not blame Obama for the murder of officers by angry black men consumed with the wrongheaded belief that blacks are victimized by the institutional racism of the criminal justice system.