Following the killing of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis on Saturday, media coverage varied greatly. Immediately following the shooting, the Trump administration pushed a specific narrative about the shooting and Pretti himself which was picked up by many conservative outlets and influencers.
Trump’s narrative
While President Donald Trump himself has not pushed any false narratives, several members of his administration did.
Within hours of the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security claimed Pretti approached the federal officers with a handgun. While Pretti did have a gun on him, the videos show he was not holding the gun or pointing it at officers.
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Despite that, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “brandished” the gun. The videos actually show his concealed gun being removed from his waistband by federal officers before they shot him.
Border Patrol Commander at Large Greg Bovino claimed Pretti’s gun showed he wanted to “massacre law enforcement.” However, there’s no evidence of that. Pretti was also a legal gun owner.
Trump has now pulled Bovino out of Minnesota and put “border czar” Tom Homan in charge. CNN reports White House officials were upset with how the administration was coming across in media coverage of the shooting.
Along with Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel also asserted Pretti attacked the federal agents and then falsely claimed Pretti broke the law by carrying a gun to a protest.
Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security, took it further, calling Pretti a “would-be assassin” despite the victim being a nurse with no criminal history. Vice President JD Vance reposted that message from Miller.
“It’s all about controlling the narrative,” Nolan Higdon, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and host of the Disinfo Detox Podcast, told Straight Arrow News. “And it’s not just about lies to change our perception of something. It’s also about trying to maintain the news media’s attention as well, so they can kind of guide where they are.”
Conservative coverage
Conservative media outlets mostly ran with the Trump administration’s misinformation.
Fox News anchors focused on promoting the Trump administration’s narrative while claiming Pretti brought the violence upon himself.
“The commentators hit a point that’s not necessarily false, but it’s very misleading, which is like, you shouldn’t bring a gun to a protest,” Higdon said. “I thought that was misleading. And then, of course, they amplify by playing and replaying over and over again the Trump administration’s lies, whether it be Kristi Noem or Bovino or Trump, their claims that this was a domestic terrorist.”
MAGA-allied influencers continued that narrative as well.
Libs of TikTok claimed Pretti tried to murder the agents and called him a “lunatic” and “would be assassin.”
Trump ally Nick Sortor, who has nearly 1.5 million X followers, quickly claimed Pretti was an undocumented immigrant. He was a native-born U.S. citizen.
“Every argument right now that conservatives are making against this victim in the shooting, they would have been horrified to hear people make that against someone like Randy Weaver and Ruby Ridge in the 1990s,” Higdon said.
That was an incident in August 1992 where Weaver and his family ended up in an 11-day standoff with federal agents. Weaver’s 14-year-old son ended up being killed along with one federal agent.
He added the hypocrisy does go both ways.
“Liberals are now rightly defending this person’s legal right to have a gun at a protest, but these very same liberals were chiding people for bringing guns to protests during COVID or Kenosha,” Higdon said.
Some gun activists, including officials with the National Rifle Association, have pushed back against the Trump administration’s arguments.
“The administration using the talking point that you shouldn’t bring a gun to a protest, he seemingly crossed like the MAGA rubicon with that one, because Second Amendment and gun ownership is an important part of the conservative movement, and it’s resulted in getting pushback,” Higdon said.
Mainstream media coverage
Networks like NBC, ABC and CBS covered the shooting with more of the evidence seen in the numerous videos.
“They’re well aware that the White House and the Trump administration tends to build a narrative not based on evidence immediately after one of these incidents, and that’s exactly what happened,” Higdon said. “As more videos came out, they try to do a good job of having a mix of law enforcement and analysts break down the videos piece by piece and explain it to the public.”
Higdon added it’s the job of the media to push back against lies.
“That’s absolutely the media’s job to push back when it’s blatantly untrue,” he said. “Some things we know are false because we have evidence to prove otherwise. Other things were just baseless claims. So, it’s not even saying it’s false. It’s saying there’s no evidence to support it.”
The Trump administration may not be able to sway some networks as much as the conservative ones, but they often try to build narratives they know the mainstream media will or has to cover and use those narratives as a distraction from other issues.
“Like the whole Greenland kerfuffle, it basically ended with the United States having the same legal rights it had previously to Greenland, but Trump makes this big spectacle and takes the news media’s attention away from things like the Epstein files or the economy,” Higdon said.
Higdon added the news media must cover stories like Greenland because of what could come of it.
“It’s a really difficult game about not taking the bait, because you don’t know if Greenland is going to end up with like World War III, so you have to cover it,” he said. “But that means you’re sacrificing these other stories and playing into his hands. So, I think it’s a very delicate game, and a lot of the deck is stacked against the news media.”
AI issues
More misinformation came in the form of AI videos and pictures. One image spread by conservative influencers showed Pretti with a gun in his right hand.
They used the fake image to justify the killing.
In reality, Pretti only had a phone in his hand and never held his gun before being killed.
“The media, I think, also has to do a job of calling out some of these videos in a responsible way and dispelling them because people think they’ve seen something they haven’t,” Higdon said.
