CNN political commentator Mary Katharine Ham shot down arguments by her fellow journalists who tried to contend that politically-motivated violent attacks against Republicans have received the same amount of coverage as the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Mediaite reported over the weekend.
The dispute was sparked by comments from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who said the media was trying to “milk” the incident in order to attack Republicans and that coverage would not be the same had Democrats not been the main target.
“I just look back and compare when I was in Congress. One event that we faced was the attempted assassination of Republican members of Congress on the baseball game,” DeSantis said.
“I actually was on the field. If you do not have the Capitol Police there, you probably would have a dozen people assassinated. That was like a one-day, two-day story. That was not something that the Capitol-based press wanted to talk about. Why? Because it totally undercut their preferred narratives.”
Maggie Haberman of The New York Times responded to those comments by writing a tweet that “he’s arguing the shootings didn’t get much coverage? Pretty sure they were a huge story.”
But Ham, a popular conservative commentator and writer, responded by pointing out on Twitter that “I lived a block from the baseball field. Under 48 hours, the news vans were gone. I was on TV, live from the baseball field where they played the game a day later, after almost being canceled by mass murder, but my topic was “Mike Pence reportedly hired a lawyer.”
She also emphasized in another tweet that “it doesn’t mean Jan. 6 doesn’t deserve coverage. Moving on after 48 hrs would be wrong for that and for Gabby Giffords! But the coverage was what it was, Scalise’s return to Congress was very sparsely covered, and the anniversary was barely mentioned.”
