WRAL’s lead political reporter and Capitol Bureau Chief Laura Leslie made some astute observations on her personal Facebook page following the mass shooting in Orlando this weekend:
Naturally the North Carolina Republican party is *pissed,* per this press release:
WRAL’s lead political reporter and Capitol Bureau Chief Laura Leslie took to social media asserting that Republicans were to blame for the horrific terrorist attack in Orlando, Florida.
“This is not ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” Leslie wrote on her Facebook page in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando attack that killed 49 victims and injured approximately 50 more. She also asserted the attack had nothing to do with ISIS, and the terrorist “blamed his religion for something he wanted to do anyway,” completely ignoring the evidence of the terrorist’s phone call to 911 pledging allegiance to ISIS.
“WRAL/Capital Broadcasting and Ms. Leslie have demonstrated political bias by their continuous failure to seek the truth and expose it. I will not accept or condone this kind of bias, and if they do not denounce Leslie’s actions, I will recommend that our candidates refuse to participate in WRAL sponsored events and activities,”said NCGOP Chairman Robin Hayes.
The Republicans are also quite pissed that WRAL “executives” (namely CEO Jim Goodmon)—likely tiring of the state’s continued global status as “perpetual laughingstock”—contributed the maximum individual amount of $5,100 to Roy Cooper’s gubernatorial campaign, and co-sponsored a fundraiser for him.
“While this is permitted behavior, in the spirit of fairness and transparency, typically these connections are fully disclosed,” the GOP statement says, never mind that the Goodmons have been high-profile donors to Democratic candidates for years.
The party wants WRAL to “denounce Laura Leslie’s Facebook attack on elected Republicans,” which is absurd, and threatens to encourage Republican candidates to refuse to participate in WRAL-sponsored events, which seems like bad strategy: if party officials just took a look at the comments on the station’s Facebook page, they’d know that WRAL is where much of the GOP’s voting base in the Triangle apparently gets its news from.
