There are many, many persistent (and false) mainstream media narratives that need to die fiery, painful deaths, and then be buried deep, deep down perhaps to the center of the earth so as to never risk being uttered ever again.
Among them is any variation of “the Capitol riot was worse than 9/11!!!” or “the Capitol breach was the worst thing to happen in our nation’s capital in centuries!!”
Of course, anytime someone objects to such ridiculous proclamations, they are immediately labeled a “terrorist sympathizer” or something batcrap insane along those lines, even though most like me who object to the media’s wildly hyperbolic characterizations will not hesitate to acknowledge that what happened on January 6th was awful and should never have happened.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the latest exasperating example of how the myth of the Capitol riot being the “worst thing in centuries” endures in media circles and clouds their reporting.
It all started after Politico national correspondent Meredith McGraw quoted from former Vice President Mike Pence’s Monday interview with Fox News’ host Sean Hannity. During their exchange, Pence told Hannity that the media’s blatantly biased coverage of the Capitol riot frustrated him.
“I know the media wants to distract from the Biden administration’s failed agenda by focusing on one day in January,” Pence stated. “They want to use that one day to try and demean the character and intentions of 74 million Americans who believed we could be strong again and prosperous again and supported our administration in 2016 and 2020.”
McGraw tweeted out the first part of that quote, which caught the attention of Washington Post White House reporter Seung Min Kim, who was outraged at how Pence referred to the riot. She responded accordingly by going there with an all-too-predictable “worst” reference, in the process causing many eyes to roll.
“That ‘one day in January’ was the worst breach of our U.S. Capitol since the War of friggin’ 1812,” Kim wrote in such a way that you could almost feel the righteous indignancy surging.
It didn’t take long for the schooling to begin:
There was also the 1971 Capitol building bombing committed by Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground terrorists, and the list goes on and on.
Ms. Kim’s quote brought to mind an infamous one from then-President Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor and speechwriter Ben Rhodes, who told the New York Times this in 2016, just months before the end of Obama’s presidency:
Simply put: While the violence that took place on January 6th was indeed unacceptable, it still shouldn’t be blown out of proportion in comparison to other attacks that have happened in decades past at the Capitol building. Regardless of what reporters may think, perspective is important here. Is this really asking too much of our supposed intellectual betters in the mainstream media?
Apparently so.