FRIDAY, JULY 11, 2025
Segregation by viewpoint: In all honesty, we'd already begun to wonder about it.
The shooting occurred on the Fourth of July. It became a larger news event when ten arrests were announced on Monday, July 7. They were ten arrests for attempted murder in an unusual shooting incident outside an immigration detention center in Alvarado, Texas.
We'd seen this matter cited with some regularity on Fox. That didn't seem like especially crazy news judgment to us.
That said, we didn't think we'd seen the incident mentioned pretty much anywhere else. We had to hunt around a while to find this report at the New York Times. The Times report has never appeared in print editions.
Headline included, the AP report started as shown. There is no paywall to vex you:
10 held in Texas immigration detention center shooting that was ‘planned ambush,’ US attorney says
Ten people have been arrested on attempted murder charges after attackers in black military-style clothing opened fire outside a Texas immigration detention center in a “planned ambush” that left one police officer wounded, a prosecutor said.
The officer was shot in the neck on Friday, the night of the Fourth of July, after reporting to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, about 40 miles southwest of Dallas. He was treated at a hospital and released, the Johnson County Sheriff’s office said.
The shooting took place as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up deportations, which will be turbocharged by a massive spending bill that became law last week.
Initially, the attackers set off fireworks, and damaged cars and a guard structure by spray-painting “traitor” and ”ICE pig” on them. The attack “seemed to be designed” to draw U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel outside the facility, “and it worked,” Nancy Larson, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said at a Monday night news conference in Fort Worth.
Two unarmed corrections officers spoke to the group in the detention center’s parking lot as someone standing in nearby woods appeared to signal with a flashlight, according to a criminal complaint. Then the Alvarado police officer arrived and someone in the woods opened fire, Larson said.
“Another assailant, who was across the street, nowhere near the corrections officers, shot 20 to 30 rounds at these unarmed corrections officers,” she said. “There was an AR-style rifle found at the scene” that was jammed, she said. A flag saying “Resist fascism, fight oligarchy,” and flyers with words such as “Fight ICE terror with class war” also were recovered near the center.
The report continues from there.
This seems like a striking event. As charged, this wasn't the act of some lone wolf, as was the case with the recent Minnesota murders. As charged, this seems to have been the act of an organized, ten-member group.
The incident was getting a lot of play on Fox. By our reckoning, it seemed to be getting weirdly limited play everywhere else.
And then, holy cow! Isaac Schorr offered an opinion piece at Mediaite which started off like this:
CNN and MSNBC Completely Ignore Left-Wing Domestic Terror Attack on ICE Agents
On the Fourth of July, 11 left-wing activists mounted a domestic terror attack on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention facility in Alvarado, Texas.
“The defendants, dressed in black military-style clothing, began shooting fireworks at the facility, as part of an organized attack,” alleged the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas in a press release on Tuesday. “After approximately 10 minutes of convening, one or two individuals broke off from the main group and began to spray graffiti on vehicles and a guard structure in the parking lot at the facility. An Alvarado police officer responded to the scene after correctional officers called 911 to report suspicious activity. When the Alvarado police officer arrived, one alleged defendant positioned in nearby woods shot the officer in the neck area. Another alleged assailant across the street fired 20 to 30 rounds at unarmed correctional officers who had stepped outside the facility.”
If you hadn’t heard about it yet, you might just be a CNN or MSNBC viewer; neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack, though CNN managed to devote a sentence to it in an online story about another attack on immigration authorities.
The piece continues from there. We don't know why Schorr cites eleven alleged assailants. He links to this formal press release which only refers to ten.
Setting that to the side, we're struck by Schorr's claim about the lack of reporting of this event on CNN and MSNBC.
Neither network has devoted a single minute of airtime to covering the attack? We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of that claim, but it tracks our own sense of puzzlement about the way this incident was and wasn't being reported within our nation's two major tribes.
These seems like a very strange event. It has led to ten arrests on the charge of attempted murder.
Red America gave it big play. It seems to us that Blue America didn't.
A few weeks back, Red America adopted a somewhat similar stance as its "cable news" messengers seemed to downplay the Minnesota murders. Increasingly, our news orgs are segregated by viewpoint, and they sometimes seem to report or disappear the types of facts which will keep their viewers reinforced in their preferred view of the world.
“FIGHT ICE TERROR WITH CLASS WAR?” Given the tenor of the times, this seems like a real news event.
