LA Times ripped for highlighting Mexican cartel victims' family's 'long history of violence'
The Los Angeles Times is facing backlash on Twitter for its coverage of the nine Americans murdered by a Mexican drug cartel. Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce reacts.
The Los Angeles Times tried to blame the brutal murder of nine Americans on the victims, instead of Mexican drug cartels, in an attempt to quash the narrative about the southern border crisis, Fox Nation host Tammy Bruce argued Thursday.
Bruce appeared on "Fox & Friends" to discuss an L.A. Times headline pointing to the LeBaron family's "long history of violence," after they were shot to death and burned alive while attending a wedding in Mexico.
"The headline is... in a certain sense these people were asking for it," she said. "Or they put themselves in that position. But here's what we've noticed. There's this [headline and], remember the attempt to rehab al-Baghdadi's reputation by calling him an austere scholar?"
The California newspaper ran a report on Monday headlined, "U.S. victims in Mexico massacre were tied to family with a long history of violence," which detailed the community's tragic past with the cartels.
"What we're seeing here, is that anything that the left or the Democrats think might interfere with their narrative, even if it involves mass murder, they're going to try to whitewash [it]," Bruce continued.
Bruce claimed this type of bias shows why President Trump is constantly at war with the media and said it should cast doubt upon its ability to report objectively on major issues.
"This is why the president is so critical so often of legacy media and why Americans look at this, and think, you can't even tell us the basic facts over a news story, the murder of women and children, how can we trust you on other issues?" she said, appearing live in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the first-ever Fox Nation Patriot Awards were held Wednesday night.
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"This is where their bias and their politics comes in," Bruce continued. "People simply want the right information so that they can decide for themselves. And when we see something this basic about, who is to not be against this, but in that case, it's about violence in Mexico, the chaos from the cartels, the importance of securing the border... It's horrible. Thank goodness for... social media, which did immediately called them out."
Various media figures with verified accounts highlighted the headline on Twitter Wednesday and trashed the Times for going over the top.
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"Is the idea here that the victims had it coming? This is an insane piece," conservative commentator Ben Shapiro reacted.
"This story is just terrible. A family is burying small children and now the media is dredging up completely unrelated events, committed by distant relatives, that happened more than a generation ago. Nice," The Dispatch senior editor David French wrote.
The Los Angeles Times later altered their headline, but did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment on the change.
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Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report