The Thursday three network morning shows of ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today, and CBS Mornings could not and therefore did not downplay the violence that occurred overnight at Columbia University as pro-Palestinian agitators occupied Butler Library during finals week. However, they did manage to sanitize the message used to justify that violence, as it was mostly claimed they simply want an end to the Gaza War.
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Meanwhile, over at CBS, Vladimir Duthiers also tried to paint the demonstrators as merely anti-war, “Let's move here to New York where there are new protests last night at Columbia University against the war in Gaza. Demonstrators surged their way into the main library as campus security pushed back. Police arrested more than 70 people in the first major protest since last spring. Tom Hanson has the very latest.”
Hanson did interview students who condemned the demonstrators and the school’s administration for letting it happen, but as for CUAD, Hanson simply referred to them as the night’s organizers with no reference to their radical beliefs, “The group that organized the occupation of the library posted this message from those inside—reading, “we refuse to show our IDs under militarized arrest. We refuse to go down quietly.”
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