Topic: Newsmax
Living up to his name, Charlie McCarthy parroted right-wing narrataives in an Oct. 13 Newsmax article:
The evening news broadcasts on all three major commercial networks failed to report on the Loudoun County Public School Board's alleged cover-up of a 14-year-old girl being raped by a boy in a skirt to pass a transgender bathroom policy, the Media Research Center said Wednesday.
The Daily Wire reported Tuesday that the alleged victim's father became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has suggested could be a form of "domestic terrorism" after he was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting in June.
Neither ABC's World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, nor the NBC Nightly News, however, reported on the alleged cover-up of the rape Tuesday night following The Daily Wire's bombshell story.
"SHAME. How can one call itself a news organization when it blacks out coverage of a story like this, which has such broad impact on the safety of our children and education? And they wonder why ratings and trust of the media continue to tank," tweeted Brent Bozell, founder and president of Media Research Center.
As we've documented, Bozell's MRC has been pushing this story to push right-wing transphobia and to help get a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, elected Virginia governor.But as we've also documented, this simplistic narrative McCarthy is dutifully repeating obscures a more complicated truth about the incident: The boy and girl previously had consensual sexual encounters before, and the incident in question began as a consensual encounter.
McCarthy is also repeating another false narrative: that school boards and the Department of Justice want to portray any parent who merely speaks out at a school board meeting as a "domestic terrorist." Further, McCarthy censored the fact that the victim's father, Scott Smith, was in fact found guilty in court of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest; in the incident in question, "Smith was arrested during an argument with a woman for whose daughter Smith’s wife had been a Girl Scout leader. Deputies dragged him to the ground, then outside, where he continued struggling and arguing with them, threatening to kick their teeth out." Instead, McCarthy offered a whitewashed version of events that made the aggressor out to be the victim:
When a female left-wing community activist told Smith she did not believe his daughter, the father said he became incensed and had a heated exchange of words with the woman.
When a police officer — who was there to keep the peace — pulled on his arm, Smith yanked it away. That quickly resulted in Smith being hit in the face, handcuffed, and dragged across the floor, with his pants pulled down.
Smith was clearly acting in a violent and terroristic manner and a court of law agreed with that assessment -- but Newsmax doesn't want you to know that.
