After the arrest of a white nationalist Coast Guard lieutenant who, according to charging documents, was allegedly planning “to murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country," NBC’s Meet the Press was the only one of the five major Sunday political news shows to mention the news. The failure of the other shows to cover the story follows a trend of many mainstream outlets largely ignoring the creeping and real threat of right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism in the United States.
On February 15, federal authorities arrested Christopher Hasson, a Coast Guard lieutenant and “a self-described white nationalist” who sought “to establish a ‘white homeland’" and wrote that he was “dreaming of a way to kill every last person on earth.” According to court documents, officials allege Hasson is a “domestic terrorist bent on committing acts dangerous to human life that are intended to affect government conduct." Authorities also discovered a stockpile of weapons and “a hit list of possible targets” including “high-ranking current and former Democratic politicians, activists, political organizations and media personalities.”
According to a Media Matters review of the major political Sunday shows -- CNN’s State of the Union, ABC’s This Week, CBS’ Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, and Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday -- Meet the Press was the only one to discuss the arrest.
As right-wing extremism and violence in the United States have surged over the last decade, mainstream media outlets have failed to properly frame and report on the growing threat. From print outlets to network and cable news, the normalization of white nationalist rhetoric and the overall growth of a violent ideology have been, for the most part, treated as backburner issues among mainstream outlets. And while mainstream media play catch-up to what is a real and serious threat -- as the arrest of a self-described white nationalist within the ranks of the U.S. Coast Guard reminds us -- Fox News, the most-watched cable news outlet in the country, continues to unabashedly and irresponsibly pander to such extremists.