Mainstream Media Blame Donald Trump for Maryland Newspaper Shooter

Mugshot of Jarrod Ramos, suspect in the mass shooting at the offices of the Annapolis Capi
Matthew Boyle
Washington, D.C.

Several members of the mainstream media blamed President Donald Trump for a suspect who allegedly killed five journalists on Thursday and reportedly had a longstanding dispute with the newspaper dating back to before Trump even declared his candidacy for the Oval Office.

Per several reports, authorities late Thursday identified Jarrod W. Ramos as the shooter who allegedly opened fire on the news staff of Maryland’s The Capital-Gazette newspaper. It came out shortly thereafter that Ramos had a longstanding battle with the newspaper dating back nearly a decade–one that resulted in lawsuits being filed and the man appearing to create a Twitter account in which he repeatedly bashed the Maryland newspaper for years.

Ramos appears to have had a long and troubled history with the newspaper. In 2011, he was convicted of criminally harassing a romantic interest. A then-Gazette columnist, Eric Hartley, wrote a story about his conviction and his history as a harasser. Ramos reportedly turned his anger on Hartley and the paper, starting a website dedicated to discrediting Hartley. In 2012, Ramos launched a lawsuit, representing himself, against Hartley, the Capital Gazette, its parent company, and editor Tom Marquardt.

“He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” Marquardt told the Los Angeles Times Thursday. “I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away.’”

Ramos lost his last appeal in the lawsuit in 2015 but appears to have continued to let loose against the paper on social media until the summer of 2016, using a defaced image of Eric Hartley as his Twitter avatar.

This appears to demonstrate a long-standing, deeply troubling hatred that Ramos had for the paper and against the legal system. Just before he allegedly went into the newspaper’s offices, a tweet was published from what appears to be Ramos’s Twitter account bashing the judge in the case he filed against the newspaper.

Ramos may have gone to such great lengths that he even appears to have made a fake Twitter account for the aforementioned judge, which he seems to have tagged in the last tweet sent from the account before the shooting on Thursday.

What’s more, there were signs, and apparently warnings, to police for years about Ramos:

But never let the facts get in the way of a good anti-Trump narrative. Multiple members of the mainstream media blamed Trump for the killings in their reactions to the tragedy.

In a since-deleted and apologized-for tweet, Reuters editor John Cox wrote that Trump had blood on his hands. “This is what happens when @realDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands, Mr. President. Save your thoughts and prayers for your empty soul,” Cox wrote on Twitter. “At least four people killed in Maryland newspaper shooting: reports.”

Cox has since deleted the tweet and apologized for it–admitting he violated Reuters’ ethical standards by saying this was connected to Trump.

Cox was hardly the only person to have engaged in blaming the president for the killings. For instance, Mike P. Williams of Yahoo tweeted:

And this one, accusing President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump of being “complicit” in the shooting:

Williams is not the only out there making allegations against Trump on this front:

What’s more, without further information about the shooter’s politics, Jared Yates Sexton–who works for Salon, a far-left publication–conflated Ramos’s long history of bashing the Gazette back to 2011 and 2012 with a sole tweet he appears to have sent out referencing Trump back in 2015. The account that appears to be Ramos’s tweeted a reference to President Trump’s lawsuit against Univision during the campaign.

Again, the tweet Sexton is referencing appears to be part of a longstanding vendetta that Ramos had against the newspaper and does not indicate either way whether the author of it supported or opposed the president in his action against Univision. It also is unclear as of now whether Ramos is a supporter of Trump or not, but a search of Ramos’s voter registration record in Laurel, Maryland, indicates he is unaffiliated with any political party.

Maryland allows voters to register by party–Republican, Democrat or any other party–and Ramos does not appear to be registered.

Similarly, Judd Legum, an editor with leftist group ThinkProgress, tweeted that Ramos “does appear to be a Trump supporter”:

Fellow ThinkProgress leftist Aaron Rupar also blamed Trump:

Vincent Frank, a sportswriter who is heard on ESPN radio, argued that Trump’s “dangerous” rhetoric led to the shooting at the Maryland newspaper:

Meanwhile, Caitlin Hu, a geopolitics editor for Quartz, implied that Trump was responsible by tweeting out this:

Gaby Dunn, a self-identified “former newspaper journalist” whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Playboy, Vice, the Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Salon, and Slate, tweeted the killings happened once Trump’s “anti-media narrative started”:

https://twitter.com/gabydunn/status/1012460333162586112

Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas tweeted:

Klaas quickly added this caveat:

Teen Vogue‘s Lauren Duca, who infamously got in a spat with Tucker Carlson on Fox News in late 2016, said that there is no separation of the president’s comments about the fake news media from the shooting in Maryland–even though, again, the shooter had a vendetta that dated back to long before Trump sought public office:

Eylon Levy, an anchor and “investigative journalist” with Israeli television outlet i24News, tweeted:

Andrew Feinberg, a White House correspondent with Breakfast Media, directly blamed the president for the shooting:

Later, when NBC News reported that the shooter was not ideologically motivated, Feinberg doubled down and falsely blamed Trump again:

Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, a former MSNBC anchor, also blamed Trump:

Mikko Alanne, a showrunner for National Geographic’s Long Road Home program, called for Republicans to push Trump to resign–and again blamed him for the shooting:

It’s unclear what the Pulitzer Prize Committee thinks of the kneejerk blaming of Trump in relation to the Maryland shooter, but someone the organization awarded a Pulitzer Prize to just last year blamed the president as well:

This Palmer Report editor does not even care that the facts don’t fit the media’s anti-Trump narrative, and says as much in this tweet:

Detroit Free Press correspondent Todd Spangler joined in blaming Trump on his Twitter account as well:

https://twitter.com/tsspangler/status/1012532008663347200?s=21

Evan Rosenfeld, the head of social media for Mediaite and a stringer for the New York Times suggested in a not-so-subtle question to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders that President Trump “contributed to” the shooting:

Anirvan Ghosh, a self-identified “communicator” and “editor” who says his work has appeared in the Huffington Post, on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, in Forbes, and in Medium, claimed that President Trump had called the journalists at the Capital-Gazette newspaper the “enemy of the people” a few days ago:

It does not appear President Trump has ever said anything about the Capital Gazette, and his comments about the fake news media being the enemy of the people refer to inaccurate media reports and specific outlets like CNN and NBC:

Adam Klasfeld, a reporter for Courthouse News based in New York, tweeted that he thinks it does not matter if there are any ties to Trump for journalists to bash Trump:

To his credit, however, Klasfeld later said it is “harmful” to speculate about the shooter’s motives:

It’s not just on Twitter that the media is bashing Trump falsely for this. CNN and MSNBC were hosting their regular rounds of fake news on Thursday night as well. See Video Above

A CNN analyst and former FBI agent, Asha Rangappa, said live on air on Thursday night:

Just to relate this back to a bigger conversation we’ve had this week about civility and rhetoric, lone wolf actors are often alienated individuals who are looking to displace their anger and frustration onto some kind of outside entity or enemy, and I think it’s worth pointing out that we’ve had a constant rhetoric coming even from the president that the press is the enemy of the people. That’s been repeated constantly, and I think it’s worth noting that if there is a link here, that the publication was being targeted, that that kind of rhetoric can be very dangerous in these times.

Also on CNN, anchor Chris Cuomo–who was just given a primetime weeknight time slot–bashed Trump on his network on Thursday night in connection with the shooting. Cuomo somehow tied this to the border crisis, as well:

The shooting, taken together with the kids stranded at the border and the political punch-fest that we’re suffering, all lead us to the same problem: those kids torn from parents, dumped all over the country, the harshness of that move, the lies about fixing it, the slow fade of interest in our society about it. The empty calls for civility; why empty? Because they’re mostly made those who are decidedly uncivil. And yeah, I’m talking about the president, those around him who excuse and empower his talk, his media friends that echo and reward it, the idea of suggesting today that this shooting is to be blamed on the left is as baseless, unproductive, and frankly stupid as it is to point to the other side.

Here is video of Cuomo:

This a developing narrative and storyline. More is likely to come soon.

Breitbart News’s Ian Mason and Kristina Wong contributed to this article. 

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