By Michael Grynbaum, NY Times:
A CNN host called President Trump a “man baby” and a piece of excrement. (He used a more profane term, and later apologized.) A guest on “Fox & Friends” proposed that Muslims in the United Kingdom be placed in internment camps, prompting an on-air disavowal from the hosts.
A Breitbart News writer argued on Twitter that “there would be no deadly attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there,” generating angry replies. And Mr. Trump himself, in his first public comment about the attack in London on Saturday night, disseminated unconfirmed information from an unofficial source: The Drudge Report.
In the 24 hours after the deadly van and knife attack, the cycle of partisan broadsides and ideological combat that seems to dominate the media universe these days kicked into high gear.
News organizations turned against each other, with anchors on Fox News calling on CNN to punish its host Reza Aslan for his profane remarks about Mr. Trump in a Twitter post.
The president’s retweet of a Drudge headline — “fears of new terror attack,” it read, even as the nature of the assault remained unclear — prompted a rebuke of sorts from NBC Nightly News, whose Twitter account pointedly noted that its journalists would not relay the president’s retweet, “as the info is unconfirmed.”
That led to accusations of liberal bias, with the “Fox & Friends” co-host Abby Huntsman asking, “Can we not just come together?”
It was the kind of chain reaction that is increasingly commonplace in a deeply polarized political environment, where news organizations attract tribal followings, and where major events like the London attack can stoke fears and inflame emotions — from Mr. Trump on down.
Mr. Aslan responded with his angry posts after the president, in the immediate wake of the attack on Saturday, wrote on Twitter that his proposed travel ban was needed to prevent terrorism. Mr. Aslan, an Iranian-American writer and religion scholar who hosts a weekly show about faith and society for CNN, also described Mr. Trump as “an embarrassment to humankind.”
That prompted expressions of outrage from right-wing news outlets like Breitbart News and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Sunday morning, who lamented his comment. CNN was already mired in an uproar over the comedian Kathy Griffin, a co-host of the network’s New Year’s Eve coverage, who posted a photograph in which she held a fake severed head meant to look like the president’s; CNN severed ties with Ms. Griffin last week.
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