Hours after Charlie Kirk was murdered, allegedly by a shooter who accused him of “spreading hate,” The New York Times falsely accused Kirk of making antisemitic statements. After getting pushback for using lies to assassinate Kirk’s character, instead of publicly apologizing, the Times’ Ashley Ahn and Maxine Joselow quietly issued a small correction noting the comment was not Kirk’s but a quote he was critiquing.
“An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement,” says the correction notice.
Friends and colleagues of Kirk’s slammed the dishonest practice, with Riley Gaines posting on X: “They lie, let their audience read it and believe it, then issue a half-hearted hidden correction at the end of the story hours (or even days) later. This is exactly how people like Charlie Kirk end up murdered.”
Fox Business’ Charles Payne wrote: “This gives chills. It speaks to the desire of mainstream media to destroy the right. I wrote about this smearing of character years ago as their primary objective. It not only supersedes everything else, including seeking truth. It destroys and attempts to rewrite or bury truth. That level of disdain is the essence of hate.”
Outkick co-founder Clay Travis posted: “The article goes out to millions, the correction is seen by hundreds. This is what legacy media has done for decades to people like Charlie.”
MSNBC aired an episode immediately after Kirk’s assassination in which host Katy Tur and guest Matthew Dowd called Kirk “one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures … who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech … aimed at certain groups.” The network initially quietly apologized for his comments via a PR account with fewer than 25,000 followers. Dowd was later fired over the comments. Tur was not.
The Guardian’s senior international reporter Peter Beaumont used what he billed as an “obituary” to falsely smear Kirk as someone who “regularly disparaged trans, gay, black and Jewish people. He was a proponent of the racist ‘great replacement theory…'”
The New York Times’ Clay Risen published an equally dishonest “obituary” just hours after Kirk’s assassination was confirmed. Risen claimed Kirk “quickly became a fixture” through tweeting “relentlessly with a brash right-wing, including inflammatory comments about Jewish, gay, and Black people.”
“He was 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. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite,” Risen wrote.
This pattern of character assassination hasn’t been limited to newsrooms. Novelist Stephen King jumped in to amplify smears against Kirk after his death, originally posting on X: “[Kirk] advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”
After facing backlash, King made several posts backtracking: “I was wrong, and I apologize. I have deleted the post.”
“I have apologized,” a separate post read. “Charlie Kirk never advocated stoning gays to death.”
“This is what I get for reading something on Twitter w/o fact-checking. Won’t happen again,” King said in yet another post.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2