A sitting Supreme Court Justice nearly got shot to death in her own driveway Wednesday night, and the two biggest evening newscasts in America couldn't scrape together sixteen seconds to mention it.
Sixteen seconds, by the way, is what ABC managed. CBS and NBC managed zero. Apparently a coordinated attempt to get armed police to gun down a justice of the highest court in the land ranks somewhere below the weather and that heartwarming segment about a dog who learned to skateboard.
Here's what happened. Around 9 p.m. Wednesday, somebody phoned in a fake report of gunshots at Justice Amy Coney Barrett's home in Fairfax County, Virginia. This is called "swatting," and it is not a prank. The entire point is to send a heavily armed police response screaming up to a house where everyone inside is asleep and unsuspecting — in the hope that something goes wrong and somebody ends up dead.
Senator Mike Lee put it about as plainly as it can be put: "Swatting is an attempt to get an innocent person killed — in this case, a sitting Supreme Court Justice."
So that's the story. The attempted murder-by-proxy of a member of the Supreme Court. You'd think that leads the broadcast. You'd think Lester Holt clears his throat and goes straight to it.
You'd think wrong.
CBS Evening News: nothing. NBC Nightly News: nothing. Not a teaser, not a chyron, not even one of those "more on that later in the broadcast" promises that never gets kept. ABC, the overachiever of the bunch, gave it sixteen seconds — roughly the time it takes to read this paragraph and clear your throat.
Now let's run a little thought experiment. Let's say someone had swatted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Or Sonia Sotomayor. Do we think the networks find more than sixteen seconds for that one? Do we think there's a panel? A "what this says about the climate of political violence" segment? A solemn anchor lowering his voice to show you it's serious?
Of course we do. We'd get a week of it. Ominous graphics, special music, a guest sociologist explaining the "broader context." We'd get Joy Reid.
That's the tell. The networks didn't miss this story. You don't accidentally overlook an attempt on the life of a Supreme Court Justice — it's not buried in a county zoning report. They made a decision. And the decision was that this particular near-killing of this particular public servant did not advance the narrative, so down the memory hole it went.
The press never shuts up about being the guardian of democracy. "Democracy Dies in Darkness," says the masthead over at the Washington Post — printed right there, like a mission statement, like a promise. Turns out the darkness is a feature. They flip the switch off whenever the wrong person is standing in the light.
This is the same crowd that spent four straight years lecturing us about "stochastic terrorism" and "dangerous rhetoric" and how words themselves are a form of violence. Somebody tried to conjure a hail of actual bullets onto a justice's actual front porch, and the gatekeepers checked whether it cleared the bar for "newsworthy." It did not. The skateboarding dog did.
Here's the part that should worry you — yes, you. Not the people who are paid to be worried on television. You. Because if the networks have quietly decided that an attempt to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice isn't worth your evening, they've also decided which Americans are allowed to be victims and which ones simply had it coming. And you don't get a vote in that newsroom.
If this all sounds familiar, it should. In June of 2022, a man named Nicholas Roske flew across the country, showed up outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home with a gun, a knife, zip ties, and a plan, and turned himself in to a 911 dispatcher before he could go through with it. An honest-to-God assassination attempt against a sitting justice — and the same networks treated it like a fender-bender, when they bothered at all. The pattern isn't new. The pattern is the point. Swat Barrett, stalk Kavanaugh — the cameras find something else to look at every single time, because the victim keeps being the wrong kind of justice.
So here's where this goes, and it isn't anywhere good. A press that learns it can disappear an assassination attempt with no consequences will keep doing it, and the bar will keep dropping. First it's sixteen seconds. Then it's a story that runs only if the target is on the approved list. Give it a few more years and "threats to democracy" will officially mean threats to one party, "political violence" will officially mean violence in one direction, and half the country will live in a country where the things that happen to them simply never happened — because the only institution with a megaphone decided they were better off not knowing. That's not a free press. That's a Ministry that just hasn't bothered to put up the sign yet.
A republic can survive a lunatic with a burner phone calling in fake gunshots. We've got cops for that. What a republic cannot survive is a press corps that watches the lunatic dial and decides the only newsworthy thing in the room is the dog on the skateboard. They'll keep telling you democracy dies in darkness. They forgot to mention they're the ones holding the dimmer switch.