Here is the tweet from (note!) 10:50 AM on Tuesday:
She followed it up later in the day with a less subtle call for hanging:
Now I've already gone around a few times with 'delusional Republican guy who thinks he can get a date.' Their defense of Stella is either "she never said 'lynch,' just 'hanged'" or "she was only saying if guilty of treason she should be hung." Hanging or lynching, Stella is calling for a sitting Congresswoman to be executed under HER criteria. And as far as the 'treason' excuse, you're predicating a lynching on a delusional conspiracy theory which all but presumes Omar is guilty. It'd be like if I said "If it's proven a certain Minnesota Republican was sexually violating livestock, as reported by Antifa News Network, then that politician should be strung up by their neck." I can do it too!
But what happened on Tuesday is not really the point of this blog post. Most people probably had no idea what Stella tweeted, until national news outlet Huffington Post first covered the story Thanksgiving evening, followed locally by Fox 9 and WCCO on Friday morning. A candidate for Federal office implies a sitting Congresswoman should be executed and the local Twin Cities news media says nothing for three days, until a national media outlet covers it. By Friday evening, November 29th, pretty much all news outlets in town had a story on it, with the shockingly incompetent Star Tribune finally catching up to HuffPo on local Minnesota political news
Yes it was Thanksgiving week, but Tuesday and Wednesday were normal work days for most news outlets. They just didn't care. Well, let me rephrase that; it seems they just didn't care because it was Ilhan Omar getting threatened.
The news media in this town, whether intentionally or ignorantly, have become pawns for the Republican Party. An embarrassing story breaks about a Democrat, and within hours the news media is in a frenzy, running stories of outrage. If a Republican does something wrong, there seems to be an attempt to bury the story, implying it wasn't really news. Once again, in this case a person called for the death of a sitting Congresswoman, and the Twin Cities news media, for three days(???), didn't deem it newsworthy. But when a DFL operative uses the term 'murder-boat,' outrage abounds!
This double standard is easiest to see in the crowd size reporting discrepancy. A GOP rally protest is held, and it gets front page coverage, even if it's 15 or fewer people. But if thousands of Democrats show up to march or rally against an issue, the news media (IF they cover it) bury the one sentence summary back by the Jumble.
Let's take a trip into an alternate reality, and reverse the political parties in this story to see how the news media would've likely covered this.
Now, considering how much the news media would salivate at Ilhan Omar calling for someone to be executed, let's not even include her. Let's say this is a white, male, Christian Democrat running to be the nominee for the MN-06 race against Tom Emmer. And let's say this fictitious nominee tweeted that Emmer should be jailed if he had prior knowledge of Trump's Ukraine quid pro quo.
If this tweet would've been sent at 10AM on Tuesday, by 4 PM on Tuesday the news media would be running with it. Headlines like "Democrat demands Emmer be Jailed Without a Trial" would be blaring out of TV sets, and in big bold fonts on the front page; above the fold for both local papers. The MNGOP would have every person in front of a microphone or camera, screaming how the Democrats want to start rounding people up without charges or evidence, how Progressives think Republicans shouldn't be given a fair trial, and how this story embodies the downfall of the Democrats ("so much for the tolerant Left...").
By Wednesday morning, Minnesota news media would be jamming their microphones and reporters notebooks into the face of every top DFL'er in the state demanding to know if they condemned the reckless comments of the Democrat in the MN-06. "Should the Democrat in the MN-06 resign immediately?" "Is this new 'jail all Republicans' policy directly from the DFL leadership?" "Besides Emmer, who else in the MNGOP is on the DFL's arrest list?" "When will the DFL offer an apology to Emmer and his family, for the pain and suffering they've put them through?"
The hypothetical DFL candidate would've been out of the MN-06 race by the time turkey was being carved on Thursday with the DFL releasing a formal apology, and, in the aftermath, the DFL would likely conceded the MN-06 as a district too toxic to even waste resources on.
I'm sure some news media reading this will be outraged. If you've watched Minnesota news from an unbiased position, you'd see how they cover politics from a right leaning lop-sided paradigm (especially ANYTHING with Rep. Omar). You'd have to acknowledge the point this post makes is legit. Then again, it's always easier to kill the messenger as opposed to admit a THREE DAY LAPSE in coverage of a MNGOP candidate for the MN-05 seat calling for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to be lynched (under certain 'parameters') is pretty inexcusable. I stand by this post.
Thank God I get my local political news from...Huffington Post.
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