Did something bad just happen in America? We know whom to blame.

Major U.S. news organizations took a short while to post their initial stories on the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump on Saturday evening in Butler, Pa. Though their journalists fully suspected that such an attack had taken place, there was only so much they could nail down right away.

So the initial headlines were tiptoeing works of lawyerly circumspection. The Post’s early offering: “Trump escorted away after loud noises at Pa. rally.”

Not good enough, countered media critics on X who saw an alleged effort to minimize the event. “Someone tries to assassinate the presumptive GOP candidate for president. And behold, your media,” wrote one poster, citing a few headlines. Thus began yet another round of media-blaming in a summer bursting with this perennial activity. We’ve now reached the point in the United States where no breakdown, no screw-up, no tragedy can be the fault alone of leaders, principals, presidents, CEOs or a sick society. Somewhere, somehow, every single time, there’s an argument or two for media complicity.

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And boy, have we ever gotten good at crafting them.

When I first saw the critique of the initial headlines from Butler, I felt sure it would fizzle. People understand that journalists have to confirm things, right? That in all the commotion, all the confusion, it was impossible to discern precisely what just happened? No, they don’t — this particular complaint snowballed into something real: “The immediate headlines from the media tried to ignore the actual story in a way you know they would not have if, God forbid, this were Joe Biden,” said the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro in a Sunday video. He slammed the Associated Press for writing that Trump was escorted off the stage after “loud noises ring out in the crowd.” “Oh, someone must have sounded an air horn or something,” said Shapiro.

The garbage backlash grew strong enough to require explainers by The Post and Mediaite. “Breaking news events — particularly one as fraught as a live event involving the shooting of a former president — are difficult to cover. Information is fluid and rumors spread fast,” wrote Mediaite’s Aidan McLaughlin.

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“Okay, we are watching live,” said CNN host Jessica Dean moments after Trump was swarmed by Secret Service agents at his lectern in Butler. “We do not know what is happening.” With cautious formulations of that sort, news organizations were all but declaring to their audiences: We’ve learned our lesson. Scroll back a decade or so, and you’ll find instances in which journalists were hammered for privileging speed over accuracy in covering tragic events. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, for instance, CNN, the New York Post and others committed a journalism seminar’s worth of errors and misjudgments, for which they sustained a wave of public scorn.

It’s here that the irony seeps in. Burned by criticism of their sloppy ways, the country’s leading outlets embraced caution, for which they’re now getting grilled. Perhaps semi-cautious journalism will thread the needle?

Just last month, a similar scenario materialized. In the aftermath of President Biden’s anemic performance in the June 27 presidential debate, critics ripped the media for not having prepared the public for just this possibility. Yet news organizations such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had covered the topic aggressively enough to warrant concerted pushback efforts from the White........

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