Fox News’ Desperate Attempts To Link Trump Shooter To Video Games Is Pathetic

When tragedy strikes, it’s human nature to search for answers. But when you’re Fox News, it seems that the answer is always the same: blame video games, social media, or anything else that fits your preconceived notions, facts be damned.

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I idly wondered how long it would take before someone tried to blame the shooting on social media, smartphones, or video games.

It took just slightly longer than I expected. On Thursday, ever reliable Fox News blasted this headline:

Trump shooter used gaming site that features presidential assassination game

And then they also mention, for good measure, that he “also had a Discord account.”

Incredibly, it took two whole reporters to come up with this story.

And let’s be clear, almost the entire story is false, and the parts that aren’t false are stupid. This is some of the worst reporting I’ve seen in a while.

The “gaming site” in question was Steam. Anyone should know it has a ton of games. Listing the “Presidential assassination game” in the headline is basically an admission of just how dishonest Fox News is because five paragraphs into the article, they mention:

“there is no evidence Crooks ever played it.”

So what’s it doing in the fucking headline, Fox?

Also, it’s even worse than that because other reporters who actually understand what “reporting” means did the research and found out that the reported Steam account that some people claimed belonged to Crooks was fake. CBS reporters had that story:

A new analysis shows an online account that was believed to belong to the shooter in the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump — and where he had purportedly called the date of the attack his “premiere” — was fake, a federal law enforcement official told CBS News on Thursday.

A law enforcement official and an additional source familiar with a briefing given to U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday previously told CBS News that the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had an account on an online gaming platform on which he posted: “July 13 will be my premiere.” But the federal law enforcement official says further investigation determined it was a fake account.

I saw some other reporting suggesting that the account on Steam was one where someone changed their username to pretend to be Crooks.

Watching the Fox News crowd get so desperate for anything to blame the shooting on is pretty pathetic. But I have no doubt that someone will bring this up in the future as if it were factual, and seeing the story morph to claim not just that he was on Steam, but that he played this supposed “Presidential assassin” game. Because facts no longer matter.