On Thursday, March 19, an 18-year-old college student at Loyola University in Chicago named Sheridan Gorman was allegedly shot dead by an from Venezuela, Jose Medina. The networks could barely touch the story, or talk about the immigration status of the alleged shooter. CBS only spent two minutes, followed by ABC at 79 seconds and NBC at 23 seconds. Searching for it on PBS or NPR found nothing.
PBS stations did waste 90 minutes on a documentary titled, “White With Fear,” about how Republicans use overtly racist tactics to win elections, and one of those, they claimed, was highlighting violent crimes by illegal immigrants. Their primary example was conservatives reporting on the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco.
The networks hate reporting on crime committed by illegal immigrants. They would insist its atypical. They love to proclaim that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans â if youre willing to dismiss the crime of entering the country illegally or overstaying a visa. But this ignores the obvious logic for grieving families like Gormans â if the alleged illegal alien killer hadnt been allowed into the country, their loved one would still be alive.
Gormans family put out a statement about their loss and the politics of it: “Sheridans death cannot be reduced to a general ‘tragedy,’ nor can it be explained away by broad references to failures somewhere else,” “We are not interested in political arguments or in watching responsibility shift from one place to another. If there were failuresâas the Governor [J.B. Pritzker] himself has acknowledgedâthen every one of them must be identified, examined, and addressed directly.”
“Our daughter is not a policy debate. She is a life that was taken, and that demands accountability,” they added.
The networks could cover this story by leading with empathy and not politics, but theyre too defensive of the Democrats, and these stories feel like “pro-Trump” narratives, so they fear upsetting their liberal friends more than they fear looking insensitive to the victimized. They dont want anyone to think that will deter violent crime.
In a sad note for the future of journalism, the editors of for describing the alleged assailant accurately in the headline as an “Immigrant man.” They changed it to merely “man” and then described him as a “Rogers Park resident” instead of an illegal immigrant. “That headline didnt reflect the most important elements in the story, and it was taken down minutes later to prevent any further harm to affected community members,” they wrote. As opposed to the “harm” the illegal immigrant is alleged to have done.
Gorman is not alone. Stephanie Minter, age 41, was stabbed to death on February 23 at a bus stop near George Washingtons Mount Vernon in northern Virginia. The alleged killer is Abdul Jalloh, an illegal alien with more than 30 arrests. “Jalloh is currently being held in Fairfax County on murder charges in Minter’s death,” according to WJLA in Washington, D.C. We didn’t find that story on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS or NPR.
But they will pounce on the when someone dies while obstructing their enforcement. The ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she drove into him was a national cause for weeks, drawing hours of coverage. But Laken Riley and Rachel Morin and 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray were skipped over as MAGA talking points. Riley and Morins convicted murderers were illegal immigrants. The alleged attackers charged in Nungarays murder are also illegals.
Last year, at the Media Research Center, we found that A
