This isn't just the question of the day. It's the existential question for the Protection Racket Media, the one question that has driven their credibility to levels only previously experienced by used-car salesmen and carnie-game operators.
The Daily Wire's Cabot Phillips shared the results of a fresh YouGov poll conducted on Sunday with over 2300 respondents reacting to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Despite the near-universal coverage of the event in the media -- or maybe because of it -- respondents seem pretty unclear about the nature of the murder and its perpetrator. That is especially true of Democrat respondents, as this shows:
A colossal media failure in one chart: https://t.co/WjWuhubuxT
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) September 16, 2025
The ethnic-demo breakdown is interesting here too, as a measure of gaslighting targets:
The YouGov poll doesn’t appear to have any saturation data on the Kirk assassination story, but Morning Consult does. That data is mainly behind a paywall but which did poll on the Kirk assassination as well as the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Outside of the paywall, we can see data that shows that 67% of respondents had heard "a lot" about the assassination and another 16% "some," while those numbers were only 32/28 for the Zarutska case that had dominated the commentariat before last Wednesday.
Loosely associating the two poll results, that means that while 83% of respondents had significant access to the news story, they appear to be woefully underinformed or outright misinformed across the board -- again, especially Democrats. Almost half of Democrat respondents (41%) believed the assassin to be a Republican, a rather bizarre assumption under the circumstances even without the significant information from law enforcement on Friday about Tyler Robinson's political views.
That translated to slightly more respondents overall thinking Robinson was a Republican (24%) than Democrat (21%), although the best answer did get the plurality -- Not Sure (40%). We actually don't know Robinson's specific party affiliation, but we certainly do know the direction of his extremism, and it ain't Republican. To the extent that party affiliation stands in for political orientation in this case, the public in general is woefully misinformed.
Given the overwhelming coverage of the assassination and the perp, why are so many people either underinformed or misinformed about the nature of the crime? Are they ignorant despite the coverage, or because of the coverage? Given the full-court press by the Protection Racket Media to obfuscate the obvious political motives in assassinating Kirk, especially after law enforcement has disclosed plenty of information relating to it, media incompetence alone cannot explain it. This is a campaign to enforce narratives rather than report facts, and we see it in every story like these:
- CNN Hides Pro-Trans Engravings on Assassin's Casings and Calls Them 'Cultural Phrases'
- CBS News: We May Never Know Motives in Kirk and Annunciation Shootings
- Anonymous Official Downplays Reports of Statements Engraved on Ammunition
- The Sickness of the People Blaming Groypers
This is a gaslighting campaign, with the express motive of creating ignorance. Jeff Blehar wrote about the media gaslighting this morning at NRO:
Instead, I want to express my burning contempt for the social media charade that I and every other conservative just had to endure: the experience of watching Charlie Kirk murdered, and then watching vast numbers of propagandists and people who know better tell us that Kirk was actually shot by a far-right “Groyper,” or a Nick Fuentes fan, or a MAGA true believer — anyone but a person associated with a left-coded cause, which Occam’s razor already suggested was the likely reality.
As each new detail trickled out, and the killer’s transgender associations became clearer and clearer, the hysterical spin and assertions of blunt unreality mounted. Cynical pros began inserting outright lies into the mix, as partisan myrmidons took up their work and used it in desperate, craven attempts to either spin facts in ridiculous ways (“his parents are Republicans!”) or simply pretend the facts weren’t “facts” at all. All of it was done with the intent of trying to will into existence — through the spread of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — an alternate narrative whose intended moral calculus amounted to, in so many words, Charlie Kirk was killed by his own team, and this is actually your fault.
We saw this same process, performed by the same outlets, regarding Joe Biden’s obvious cognitive deficiencies. In that years-long campaign, the media took talking points from the cover-up conspirators in the White House to accuse anyone pointing out Biden’s obvious signs of incapacity as “ageist,” of using “cheap fakes,” while insisting that Biden was Sharp As A Tack® and Running Rings Around Aides Half His Age. That worked for years until Biden exposed himself as unfit for office on national television, at which point the same ‘reporters’ started churning out Now It Can Be Told books to profit off their previous gaslighting.
In that context, this poll result does not represent a “colossal media failure.” It represents an astounding success for propagandists and gaslighters seeking to divert accountability from the Left yet again. Let’s hope we can expose this enough so that the media trust numbers drop to where they truly belong — at the bottom of any Y axis, at any scale.
Also, the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today's show features:
- As political violence ramps up, is it time for another 'national conversation'? Nope, says Andrew Malcolm.
- Those are just excuses for one-way lectures and demands to suppress real debate.
- We need to protect debate and dissent, and we discuss that in the context of the media coverage of the Charlie Kirk assassination.
The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk in order to advance their political narratives rather than the truth.
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