On one hand, we should be glad the mainstream media, after ignoring it for weeks, is finally acknowledging the brutal murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, N.C. On the other hand, the MSM's coverage has been so twisted that it’s hard not to be as outraged by how it reported the story as we were by its initial silence.
I previously reported on how Axios framed the story as just another “Republicans pounce” narrative, portraying the murder as something MAGA is trying to exploit. Unsurprisingly, CNN jumped on the same bandwagon. On Monday night’s NewsNight with Abby Phillip, the gaslighting reached a level that was truly beyond the pale.
CNN contributor Kara Swisher set the tone, attempting to frame the attack as some sort of political football. She suggested the Trump administration might have been “looking for an example” in the video of the stabbing, which she called “quite disturbing.” She even compared the situation to Democrats in the 1988 presidential election, claiming it reminded her of how Michael Dukakis’s campaign was supposedly derailed by the infamous tank photo—essentially reducing a brutal murder to fodder for partisan point-scoring.
That’s when Abby Phillip played a clip of The Charlie Kirk Show, during which Kirk pointed out that the victim was a white Ukrainian refugee, and highlighted the glaring lack of national attention compared to similar crimes against black victims:
A white Ukrainian refugee was murdered just because she was white. Everybody knows that obviously. If a random white person simply walked up to and stabbed a nice law-abiding black person for no reason, it would be an apocalyptically huge national story used to impose national, sweeping political changes on the whole country. Instead, Meghan Basham, no one seems to care when a white woman gets stabbed to death.
CNN’s reaction was almost comical in its hypocrisy.
Instead of engaging with the reality of Kirk’s observation, Swisher simply remarked, “Wow. He said white a lot.”
Her co-panelist Arthur Aidala, a criminal defense lawyer, tried to pivot the discussion to mental health, claiming it was “about taking away people’s freedom versus evaluating their mental illness” and insisting that New York has programs to handle such cases — programs, of course, that require cooperation from the mentally ill.
Van Jones then chimed in, adding insult to injury. After acknowledging that Zarutska’s death was “horrible” and “everybody’s nightmare,” he pivoted to attack conservatives for “race mongering.” He claimed, “For Charlie Kirk to say, we know he did it because she’s white, when there’s no evidence of that, is just pure race mongering, hate mongering. It’s wrong.”
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"No one mentioned the word race, white, black, or anything except him,” Jones added. "What people mention is the horror of what happened to this young woman."
Except it’s not. We know from the surveillance video from the train that, after the murder, the killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., said multiple times, “I got that white girl.”
So, Van Jones is once again wrong.
CNN still doesn’t get it. Pointing out the double standard in media coverage isn’t “jumping on a bandwagon;” it’s calling out a culture that pretends racial double standards don’t exist while claiming to mourn tragedy fairly. These are the same people who have no trouble assuming a racial motive the moment the victim is black, yet when the victim is a white Ukrainian refugee, suddenly the story becomes about mental health abstractions and “hate mongering.” By obsessing over narratives instead of the actual crime, CNN has once again shown what really matters to the network. And it’s not the truth.
Mainstream media stayed silent on Iryna Zarutska’s murder, then smeared conservatives for revealing the truth. PJ Media fearlessly calls out this hypocrisy and the double standards of Big Media. Join PJ Media VIP for exclusive content and ad-free browsing, and use the promo code FIGHT for 60% off your membership. Support fearless journalism now!