FNC’s Kurtz Defends Network, Tucker Carlson over Buffalo Shooting — ‘Troubling,’ ‘Absurd’

On Sunday, Fox News Channel’s “MediaBuzz” host Howard Kurtz took the opportunity to defend his network and colleague Tucker Carlson after they were blamed for the recent Buffalo shooting aimed at black shoppers.

Kurtz aired clips of MSNBC hosts saying Fox News Channel was to blame for the shooting and said to blame the network or Carlson was “absurd.” He called the “knee-jerk partisanship” response to mass shootings “troubling.”

“The murder of 10 innocent people in Buffalo is utterly heartbreaking in so many ways — all victims of a suspect whose writing reeks of racism, antisemitism, and a twisted mind,” Kurtz stated. “But what I also find troubling, and I have been talking about this for decades, is the knee-jerk partisanship with which pundits and politicians on the left and sometimes the right respond to mass shootings. President Clinton blamed the Oklahoma City bombing in part on Rush Limbaugh. Liberal pundits, and later The New York Times, blamed a mass shooting in Tucson on a Sarah Palin political map that the gunman never even saw. But when a liberal Bernie Sanders supporter, a Rachel Maddow fan, wounded Steve Scalise and others five years ago at a Republican congressional baseball practice, the media didn’t blame Maddow or left-wing philosophy, and they shouldn’t have. Yet, after mostly black shoppers were gunned down in that Buffalo supermarket, people who don’t like this network or compete with this network unleashed this constant barrage — it’s partially Fox’s fault.”

“A chief target has been Tucker Carlson,” he continued. “Now, his comments on immigration and politics and those of anyone at this network are, of course, fair game for public debate, but blaming him for the shooting is absurd. The latest case of a blood-on-your-hands approach to finger-pointing, even if you’re Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer trying to score political points by attacking Fox. And by the way, there’s nothing in the suspect’s hundreds of rambling pages that indicates he has ever watched one minute of Fox News.

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent