In the wake of MSNBC personality Matthew Dowd making absolutely horrific comments about Charlie Kirk being responsible for his own death due to his “rhetoric” in the wake of his assassination in Utah, online criticism is hammering MSNBC’s executives and responsible owners, the Comcast Board of Directors, demanding that they be held responsible for what Dowd said.
As background, the incident occurred when Dowd was speaking to MSNBC’s Katy Tur on her show “Katy Tur Reports” and told her, “I emphasize what you just emphasized, we don’t know any full details of this. We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, so we have no idea about this.”
Continuing, Dowd then suggested that Kirk’s “hateful” words and thoughts justified his killing, saying, “But following up with what was just said, he’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech, or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts, lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
Still not done, Dowd then doubled down on that, telling Tur, “And I think that’s the environment we’re in, that people just-, you can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have, and then saying these awful words, and then not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”
The response to that was a flurry of chaos, with MSNBC firing Dowd and MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler apologizing for Dowd’s comments, saying, “During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.”
Despite that apology and firing, many online thought MSNBC and its owner had done nowhere near enough to walk back the irresponsible rhetoric it made about Kirk and conservatives generally. Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, for example, wrote, “@Comcast owns MSNBC. The production, hiring, and philosophy behind this execrable programming are, at their heart, business decisions. Brian Roberts and his colleagues on Comcast’s Board of Directors are ultimately responsible for this content.”
That came in response to British media personality Piers Morgan, himself no conservative, calling out MSNBC for its horrific rhetoric, saying, “MSNBC’s shameful output since Charlie Kirk was shot, first suggesting it was one of his own supporters firing a gun in ‘celebration’, then inferring he brought it on himself with his opinions, confirms everything I’ve always suspected about the woke left – they’re repulsive.”
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In any case, commenters on Fitton’s post largely agreed with him, with one such commenter writing, “Any company corporate or private that advertises on MSNBC or any of there affiliates should be boycotted and put out of bussiness. Warriors of X need to create a list so we all know what evil promotes and invests on MSNBC.”
Watch Dowd here:
Featured image credit: Mike Mozart from Funny YouTube, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons