Radio host Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves Tuesday and questioned the media’s portrayal of 19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
In doing so, the conservative commentator compared the media’s treatment to Dzhokhar to Trayvon Martin.
According to Mediaite, Limbaugh said, “The news media are doing to Dzhokhar what they did to Trayvon Martin. They’re regularly showing a photo of Dzhokhar that was taken when he was about 14. Soft, angelic, nice little boy. Harmless. Cute. Big, loveable eyes.”
“The way, when we’re shown Osama bin Laden, it’s in his shepherd pose with his walking stick, walking through the mountains or whatever,” he added.
The radio host said that the images of Dzhokhar portray him as a “totally normal kid.” Limbaugh argued that “he’s not a kid and he’s not a normal kid.”
“The news media is making him seem like an innocent little angel who was totally willing to drive over his own little brother to try to get away,” he said.
He then played a series of clips from news reports that referred to Dzhokhar as “just a kid.”
Limbaugh used the audio bites to attack the press, claiming that the images are “not at all what he looks like today.” Instead, Limbaugh says he sees a “radical college kid.”
After a commercial break, Limbaugh returned and posed a question to his audience.
He asked, “Does that not bother anybody? A normal college kid is capable of putting together a pressure cooker bomb. This is how these things end up getting bastardized. This is how we end up not thinking ill of bad people.”
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