OPINION
Premium

Another Shooting by ICE Has the Press Desperately Looking for Ways to Reframe the Episode

Brad Slager
Brad Slager  |  Jan 15, 2026
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Get access to Brad Slager's "Riffed From the Headlines," a daily VIP feature where he looks to bring accountability to the mainstream media. Use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your VIP membership!

News Avoidance Syndrome – THE NEW YORK TIMES

  • So we are going with this being an unprovoked shooting.

In a way, we can see the point of The Times needing to deflect from the reality of the latest ICE shooting. After all, after it performed a Zapruder-level analysis on last week's shooting event, where they definitively declared the agent was never struck BEFORE the agent's own cell phone video showed he had been hit, they want to dismiss any further evidence from ICE.

So it is with the latest, as the paper seems to want to avoid the detail that this time the agent opened fire after being ambushed by three assailants.

We have to guess that the words "After Attack" were too cumbersome after reiterating last week's shooting.

Stealth Story Evolution – WASHINGTON POST

  • Seems this would have been a better edit to commit BEFORE publication.

At The Daily Wire, Cabot Phillips saw the WaPo report on the shooting and noted it took quite a long time before bringing up the specifics about why the ICE agent shot the illegal alien in the leg. Then something shifted.

That paragraph now appears as the third one in the article, and the Internet Archive is forbidding access to the earlier versions of the revised piece.

Artisanally-Crafted Narratives – NBC NEWS

  • That photo though…

Also getting in on the game of hyping the shooting while minimizing the motive, NBC also saw fit to downplay the attack on the ICE agent involved, and did so in a particularly craven fashion.

Take a gander at the photo used on the report, a wholly unrelated image of "innocents" holding up their arms in front of a phalanx of ICE agents in full riot gear.

BlueAnon – THE ATLANTIC

  • Frum is beginning to sound like an escapee from the asylum.

We are very conditioned to David Frum's reliance on projected conspiracies. Just last year alone, he declared the president was going to take over control of the midterms based on what he saw in the sending of troops to D.C. And to the violence erupting in Chicago. Also, Charlie Kirk's assassination was to be used as an excuse to manipulate elections. He's a very daft man.

But even by his own wild standard, Dave may really be losing it. For his latest bat-guano-conspiracy, he turns geopolitical, saying that Trump "let" Iranian protesters die, while at the same time he was plotting to assassinate our allies in NATO from Denmark. 

Glossary Over Things – CNN

  • "Supremacist dog whistles" are set to be all the rage.

Of course, when you are a journalist griping about the immigration policies, you HAVE to resort to cries of racism. At CNN, they look at some of the recruiting language used by DHS and ICE officials and come to the conclusion that, obviously, they use coded language to appeal to white supremacists. 

One precious example was this one, offered by Dana Bash, in a segment focusing on this CNN report.

DANA BASH: Want to show, which is a little bit more coded, I think, if you have to know to know. This is a post from the White House just yesterday. “Which way Greenland man?” And the same kind of post from DHS in August. “Which way American man?” Well, in 1978, there was a White supremacist, William Gaylee Simpson, who wrote, “Which way Western man?”

Oh…kay then…

So the use of a two-word phrase, in reference to Greenland, was also once used by some obscure reactionary half a century ago, who few, if any, people even know about. And what exactly is it about Greenland that even ties into white supremacy that it would be useful to go with this usage?! You get a sense of Dana's desperation with her describing it as "a little bit more coded."

Or, put another way, "A lot bit more desperate."

Consider the lengths they go to make these tenuous connections and therefore declare the "obvious" white supremacy, yet when it is pointed out how Zohran Mamdani frequently quotes communist phrases directly, it is made deniable that he is actually a communist.

Legalized Press-titution – THE DNC

  • Yet, Joe Rogan was considered the problem…

Making this one all the more hilarious is that just days ago, we had a parade of Democrats flooding onto social media to decry antisemitism…finally.

Months back, for some reason, Hasan Piker rose to prominence as one of the new podcasting voices on the Left. Apparently, his willingness to go after those on the Right was sufficient for him to be brought into the fold. But now Piker has felt emboldened by his newfound stature, so he feels free to let his Hamas freak flag fly, and the Dems and the press are stuck trying to rationalize their pet project.