The imaginary violence against the news media

Let us hear from CNN’s Jim Acosta again, though, about how scared he is of Trump supporters while signing autographs for — Trump supporters!

[Also read: Ivanka Trump says media is not the ‘enemy’]

Acosta posted a video Tuesday on Twitter of a crowd of Trump supporters at a rally in Tampa, Fla., shouting at him and the presumably others in the news media.

“Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa,” wrote a somber Acosta in his tweet. “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy.”

So poorly treated was Acosta that he didn’t have the wherewithal to record a video of the nice people at the same rally who asked for his signature.

Evan McMorris-Santoro, a reporter for Vice News, said he saw that happen.

No mention of that from Acosta, just like you no longer hear about the Maryland newsroom sprayed with bullets by a man who had not been inspired by Trump, as journalists immediately rushed to assume, but had a yearslong vendetta against the publication.

And nor do you hear anymore about James Hodgkinson, the Bernie Sanders supporter who hated Republicans and put a bullet in the hip of Steve Scalise, R-La.

Scalise and four others who had been practicing on a baseball field just outside of Washington, D.C., in June last year were hospitalized as a result of Hodgkinson’s shooting spree. Hodgkinson’s Facebook page showed that he belonged to the groups “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” One note on his Facebook said, “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

Before his armed rampage, he asked Reps. Ron DeSantis and Jeff Duncan as they left the field early whether it was Republicans or Democrats practicing.

That came after months of the left-wing media and Democrats calling Trump and his supporters racist, sexist, xenophobic, un-American, and dangerous.

And after one congressman was hospitalized, along with four others, the most the media could do was call for civility from “both sides.”

A bemused editorial in the Washington Post at the time asked, “Who knows what mixture of madness and circumstance causes someone to pick up a gun and go on a rampage?”

Call on me! Call on me! I know!

Democrats and the media aren’t asked to be held to account for the Hodgkinson incident, even as Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., now actively encourages physical confrontation of anyone who supports the White House.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” she yelled at a rally in Washington. “And if you see anybody from that [White House] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them.”

Waters said on MSNBC the same day that people are “going to absolutely harass” members of the Trump administration “until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No, I can’t hang with you.'”

Every tweet of Trump’s is treated by the media like an attempt to repeal the First Amendment and lock up journalists. Meanwhile, Waters calls for people to “harass” the White House and it’s covered as if it were another day that the sun rose in the east.

It’s been nearly three years of the news media droning on and on about looming violence inspired by Trump, and we still haven’t seen any evidence of it.

When will reporters instead make sure that another Democrat isn’t about to shoot up a baseball practice?