While CNN and MSNBC each spent only around 10 minutes covering last week’s mass shooting at a funeral in Chicago, Fox filled the void with over an hour’s worth of coverage of the incident that pushed problematic tropes about urban gun violence and blamed the city's Democratic leadership.
On July 21, 15 people in Chicago were injured in a drive-by shooting during a funeral for the victim of a different drive-by shooting. Several people at the funeral fired back at the vehicle before the driver hit a parked car and the occupants fled on foot.
That same day, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot confirmed the Trump administration’s plans to send federal agents to the city in order to combat rising “violent crime.” President Donald Trump made the formal announcement on July 22 that, as part of “Operation Legend,” his administration would be sending a ”surge” of federal agents to "help drive down violent crime” in Chicago.
In the week following the shooting, from 4 a.m. July 21 until midnight July 28, the three major cable news networks covered the shooting for just over an hour and a half in total, a Media Matters study found. CNN and MSNBC contributed 12 and 11 minutes of that time, respectively, while Fox News dominated with just over 1 hour and 15 minutes of coverage. All live programming was included in this analysis.
All three cable news networks aired breaking news updates about the shooting in the 24 hours after it took place. They also put the incident into a broader context by mentioning it in more wide-ranging or multi-topic discussion segments.
On CNN and MSNBC, that broader context included covering rising gun violence through the summer across the nation and discussing what the federal involvement in Chicago will look like.
But there was significantly more coverage on Fox, where the discussion included framing the shooting as a “typical night” in Chicago, blaming the city’s Democratic leadership for the violence, and insisting it could be solved if only the city’s police were not handcuffed by activists who demanded they “stop enforcing the law.”
Fox News was the only network to cover the shooting the night it happened, and prime-time host Sean Hannity immediately used the opportunity to call Lightfoot “incompetent” and to blame the violence on ”decades of Democratic rule.” That same night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham opened her show with the Chicago shooting before comparing the city to “the Wild West.”
The next day on Fox News’ Outnumbered Overtime, The Hill’s Joe Concha brought up the funeral shooting only to accuse MSNBC and CNN of purposefully not covering it because "maybe it steps on a narrative around what’s going on in cities like Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, and New York.”
That night, Hannity characterized the mass shooting as another “typical night” in Chicago because the mayor ”hates the president more than she cares about innocent men, women, and children in her city”: