On March 7, a throng of left-wing counter protestors met with a small right-wing protest outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamadani. From within the crowd, 18-year-old Emir Balat threw a homemade bomb and yelled “Allahu akbar.” Balat and his friend Ibrahim Kayumi were arrested for the attack, and law enforcement later determined that the two were ISIS sympathizers.
All of the above information was publicly available by the afternoon of March 7. By 2:00 p.m. ET, several videos of Balat throwing the bomb were already circulating on social media, in which he could clearly be heard yelling the well-known Islamist slogan.
Despite all of that information being readily available, the New York Times’s first headline about the incident read: “Homemade Bomb Thrown at Protest Near N.Y.C. Mayor’s House, Police Say” — a summary so vague that it almost seemed to pin the bomb-throwing on the right-wing protestors.
The Times was not alone. The Washington Post, too, not only excluded any information about the would-be arsonist, but heavily implied that the bomb was thrown by an anti-Islam protestor: “Police investigating after device thrown at anti-Islam protest in New York City.”
Not to be outdone, the AP’s first headline about the attack read: “Police investigating after device thrown at anti-Islam protest in New York City.”
In fact, it was as if the entire elitist left-wing media unanimously had agreed to bamboozle as many readers as possible into believing that a crazed right-winger had thrown a bomb at Zohran Mamdani’s residence.
AP: Police investigating after device thrown at anti-Islam protest in New York City
ABC: 6 arrested after ‘suspicious device’ thrown during protest outside NYC mayor’s home
CBS: Smoke devices launched near Gracie Mansion during protest, NYC police sources say
NBC: Two people in custody after ‘suspicious devices’ found outside Zohran Mamdani’s official residence
CNN: 2 arrested after ignited device was thrown amid tensions between counter protest groups outside NYC mayor’s mansion
MS NOW: NYPD arrests six after improvised explosive device thrown near Mayor Mamdani’s home
NEW YORK TIMES: Homemade Bomb Thrown at Protest Near N.Y.C. Mayor’s House, Police Say
WASHINGTON POST: Police investigating after device thrown at anti-Islam protest in New York City
Two or three outlets publishing lazy, vague headlines perhaps could be written off as a coincidence. But the sheer uniformity across all of these outlets suggests the lack of detail was deliberate, and likely politically motivated.
In the days following the attack, all of these outlets did eventually let on that the deadly explosives were thrown not by anti-Mamdani protestors, but by two enraged ISIS-sympathizers. But the vast majority of those begrudging admissions came well after this initial slew of headlines. PBS was the only broadcast outlet to hold off on publishing anything about the story until March 9, when pretty much everyone in the left-wing media sphere was already acknowledging the ISIS connection.
Then, having reluctantly divulged the inconvenient details of the story, the lefty journalists began churning out stupid puff pieces about the accused terrorists.
On March 10, CNN promoted their article about the accused bombers on X, in a post so preposterous that even the network’s own media critic, Brian Stelter, called “outrageous.” However, he went on to claim that “the story itself was solid,” despite the fact that the post was basically just a copy-past of article’s lede.
The New York Times, meanwhile, was fascinated that Balat — now an accused terrorist — once upon a time had been not just a child, but a child who made shoes.
Considering the high degree of similarity of the initial headlines across numerous outlets, it certainly looks like the corporate left-wing press have been adhering to a set of unspoken rules about how to cover any political violence committed by anyone other than a right-winger:
First, be vague. Employ the passive voice whenever possible; don’t say who threw the bomb when you can instead say that a bomb was thrown. That removes the need to identify who did the throwing.
Second, find any decent excuse to mention the political right, or at least anything that connotes right-wing thought for the reader. When paired with deliberate vagueness about who committed the act, this can produce the desirable effect of “accidentally” convincing some readers that the act was carried out by a conservative, or a Trump supporter, or the like.
Finally, if the perpetrator is a member of a “favored group” (read: any demographic which generally leans Democratic), avoid even the slightest allusion to that group until law enforcement have already made the information public. Basically, muddy the water as much as possible ahead of any public statement by the police.
Without exception, all of the above outlets followed rules one and three impeccably. Each outlet’s adherence to rule number two is more a matter of interpretation. Arguably, CBS’s initial mischaracterization of the bombs as “smoke devices,” along with their mention of police in the headline, could have be construed as referring to riot control devices. Meanwhile, the CNN headline seemed not to point a finger in any particular direction, thanks to its mention of two dueling protest groups. But it’s hard to say either of these outlets deserves credit just because they didn’t join their contemporaries in willfully misleading readers.
A 2024 study led by Penn State researchers found that just 25 percent of social media users who shared news headlines even bothered to open the article, let alone read any of it. If those findings are at all accurate, then it’s no wonder why an institution as rabidly political as the elitist media would publish such misleading headlines about a story like this.
