Not long after bullets rang out at former and perhaps future President Donald J. Trump’s rally on Saturday, CNN announced “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.” Bloodied by a shot that might have killed had his head been tilted just a few centimeters, what happened was plain and obvious to the GOP frontrunner, his security detail, thousands of spectators assembled at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and millions of others watching on live television: President Trump was the object of an assassination attempt. In case there was any lingering doubt, Trump rose with blood visibly pouring down his face from an obvious wound as the Secret Service quickly moved him off stage, leaving him only a few seconds to raise his fist and repeat “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

As it turns out, the radical left-wing cable television network was not alone in underreporting the first known assassination attempt against an American president since 1981. The Washington Post, whose leftist bias may be responsible for a massive recent decline in its readership and profits as well as a recent scandal involving the replacement of its editorial direction, reported that Trump was “escorted away after loud noises.”

MSNBC, often derided by critics as “MSDNC” due to a perceived leftist bias that may well be responsible for its chronically low ratings, reported “loud popping noises,” as though a rally attendee had been loudly chewing gum. The New York Times, which the next day printed a lengthy editorial detailing numerous but highly disputed reasons why Trump should not be reelected president, reported that he was “rushed off stage after chaos at rally.” Maybe someone dropped a casserole. ABC and CBS News merely reported “possible shots.” NBC News, which had previously described talk of possible assassination attempts against Trump as “conspiracy theories,” chose to describe the incident in the passive voice, initially reporting that “shots were heard.” One might wonder if “mistakes were made.”

In his statement on Sunday, Joe Biden seemed to be on board with the media messaging, referring to the incident as “the shooting at Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania” rather than an assassination attempt against his opponent—an opponent he and has allies have consistently demonized, said “needs to be stopped,” prosecuted in what are largely regarded as politically motivated indictments, and who, it needs to be said, was leading the presidential race in virtually every poll.

In comparison, the right-leaning New York Post almost immediately reported “an apparent assassination attempt,” as did Fox News and Newsmax, conservative television news networks. Even the stuffy Wall Street Journal, which leans right without generally taking many risks, conceded “apparent shots” in its initial coverage rather than merely “possible” ones.

The gaping difference between reporting on the right and the left leads to just one conclusion: right-wing outlets accurately reported that President Trump was targeted for assassination while left-wing outlets resisted the obvious and appeared to try for as long as they could to minimize the impact of the incident by leaving room for alternative explanations. They may well have considered what so many have concluded since the incident: that an assassination attempt would markedly increase Trump’s chances of winning in November. Media that oppose him might naturally have wanted to weaken that perceived advantage or perhaps even lead the “narrative” in another direction.

Indeed, within hours a fair number of leftist outlets, while at last accurately reporting the incident as an assassination attempt, were already attempting to qualify political violence as an issue confronting both sides of the political divide in equal measure. Even though neither President Biden nor any other Democratic presidential candidate has been the object of a known assassination attempt since George Wallace in 1972, the media seemed to want to normalize Trump’s shooting as part of a shared national culture of political violence for which Republicans, including Trump himself, may be responsible.

In the current circumstances, that does sound rather like “victim blaming”—something the left stridently tells us never to do—but the country is well aware of what the already widely distrusted legacy media hoped to accomplish by temporizing when an assassin’s bullet nearly took the life of a former president of the United States and current major party candidate on national television.

A “mostly peaceful assassination attempt,” mocked commentator Michael Doran on X, referring to the false and widely ridiculed use of that modifier to describe 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, which claimed at least 25 lives, injured thousands more, and inflicted over $2.5. billion in damage. Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who endorsed Trump just minutes after the assassination attempt, posted an image of Julius Caesar’s assassination over CNN’s signature “Breaking News” logo with the mock headline “Caesar Injured in Group Hug.” The good news is that like these commentators, many other Americans are on to antics of the legacy media recognize who the enemies of democracy truly are.