Fox News’ Trey Gowdy on Tuesday reportedly offered an unflinching critique of the national press, accusing mainstream outlets of showing little interest in the recent killing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee murdered aboard a Charlotte train.
The remarks came hours after President Donald J. Trump released a video from the White House, where he called Zarutska’s death the latest example of rising lawlessness. “We cannot allow a depraved criminal element of violent repeat offenders to continue spreading destruction and death throughout our country,” Mr. Trump said. “We have to respond with force and strength. We have to be vicious, just like they are. It’s the only thing they understand.”
At a press briefing later in the day, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the case. But reporters, as Fox correspondent Bill Melugin noted, largely steered their questions elsewhere. “I pretty much didn’t hear any questions about this young Ukrainian woman,” Mr. Melugin said on air. “Maybe one half question off the top. There were a whole lot more questions about Jeffrey Epstein, who’s been dead for years now.”
Turning to Mr. Gowdy, the former congressman from South Carolina, Mr. Melugin asked: “Your thoughts on just the overall lack of national media interest in this case?”
Mr. Gowdy did not hesitate. “Yeah, I’ll say it to you as bluntly as I can: she’s a blue-eyed blonde, and the media doesn’t give a damn,” he replied.
For Mr. Gowdy, the discrepancy revealed a pattern. “So if it’s someone else killing someone else, and look, I happen to be apolitical on this. I don’t want anybody killed. I don’t care about race, politics, gender, I’m all for it. I see life between people of good conscience and criminals. But the media does not,” he said.
He pointed to recent cases that dominated headlines by contrast. “So, if it’s an African-American female that is killed, the media goes up in arms, or look at Daniel Penny. That case, how much attention did that case get? And yet, the mainstream media can’t say a word about this young lady in Charlotte,” he argued.
Mr. Gowdy added that many Americans had never heard of another recent victim. “And Logan Federico, most people are sitting there saying, ‘Who in the world is that?’ It’s another blue-eyed blonde that is killed by someone who never should have been out of prison, but it doesn’t fit The New York Times narrative, therefore they don’t cover it.”
The blunt remarks underscored a broader conservative critique: that legacy outlets select stories not by their significance but by whether they advance a preferred political narrative.
Mr. Trump’s call for “force and strength” and Mr. Gowdy’s charge that the media had effectively turned a blind eye converged on the same point — that the lives of victims like Zarutska should not be subject to selective attention, nor should their tragedies be minimized because they do not fit a particular storyline.
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