Karoline Leavitt Shames Reporters to Their Faces Over Iryna Zarutska Coverage, Highlights Clear Double Standard
At the White House news briefing on Tuesday, Karoline Leavitt let the Washington press corps have it.
The White House press secretary is already known for speaking her mind to the faces of the activists who pass for journalists in the establishment media.
But on the subject of the gruesome murder of a Ukrainian war refugee in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August, Leavitt was scathing.
Calling the savage stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska by a 34-year-old career criminal named Decarlos Brown Jr. a “tragedy that has not received nearly enough media attention,” Leavitt blasted the reporters in the room as well as their employers for avoiding the story.
“Here are the facts that many outlets have shamefully and intentionally failed to report,” Leavitt said.
After describing the circumstances surrounding the stabbing, Leavitt summed up the situation neatly:
“This is pure evil on full display,” she said.
But she didn’t stop with the man who held the knife.
“And perhaps most shamefully of all, the majority of the media, many outlets in this room, decided that her murder was not worth reporting on originally because it does not fit a preferred narrative,” Leavitt said.
Every honest American who heard her words — regardless of personal politics — knew exactly what she meant, and that the double standard of news coverage was in effect.
Zarutska was white. Her alleged killer is black.
Had the victim been black and the killer white, there’s no question that the story — with its real-time surveillance video component — would have been highlighted in every establishment news outlet.
The media would have featured flood-the-zone coverage, including, no doubt, chin-stroking think pieces on how the murder personified the inherent racism of the American public — and how, surely, President Donald Trump is somehow to blame.
Instead, the establishment media met Zarutska’s killing with largely collective silence, only turning attention to it when Trump himself commented on the incident.
And even then, the story was about the politics of the case — framed in a classic “Republicans pounce” format.
New York Times: “A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right.”
Axios: “Stabbing video fuels MAGA’s crime message.”
On CNN’s “News Central” on Monday, the loathsome Brian Stelter — CNN’s “chief media analyst” — claimed that “Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, other Trump aligned figures succeeded in making this senseless death a symbol of big city crime.”
Leavitt was particularly effective comparing the indifference that greeted Zarutska’s killing with the national spotlight on the case of Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who went on trial in Manhattan and faced a prison sentence after restraining a violently disturbed man who was threatening a subway car full of passengers in 2023.
Penny is white. The man he killed — an act that was unintentional, by all the evidence — was black.
“Many of the journalists in this room spilled plenty of ink trying to smear Daniel Penny for defending a subway car from a deranged lunatic in New York City, but none of those same reporters lifted a finger to write stories about an actual murderer,” Leavitt said.
The scene lit up on social media:
JUST IN: Karoline Leavitt SHAMES “reporters” to their faces for REFUSING to cover the kiIIing of Iryna Zarutska
“Many of the journalists in this room spilled PLENTY of ink trying to SMEAR Daniel Penny for defending a subway car from a deranged lunatic in New York City, but… pic.twitter.com/xH6FyGxQkB
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 9, 2025
Good job @PressSec – the MSM is evil
— Elizabeth Helgelien (@ElizabethForNV) September 9, 2025
The lying media needs to be taken down. Not sure why they are still allowed to spew lies and get away with it.
— 🌸 MAGA B 🌸 • (@TGrammie2) September 9, 2025
I’m glad that the media is being called out so much for this. I can’t wait until the MSM is a thing of the past and we never have to hear their propaganda masquerading as “journalism” ever again.
— Cory Corson (@Cory_Corson) September 9, 2025
The days have long been gone when gatekeepers of mainstream media could effectively decide what news Americans would hear and what they would not.
But the decisions by establishment news media outlets remain rooted in the idea that what is not reported by them does not qualify as news.
In the technological context of the internet, that’s impossible to maintain. In the political context of the second Trump presidency, when mainstream outlets forfeited their credibility during Trump’s first term, it’s a disaster for them to even try.
Leavitt called them out on it. Any American paying attention knows exactly how true it was.
And for all their self-imposed blindness, the so-called journalists in the briefing room had to know it, too.
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