One year to the day after a gunman killed Charlie Kirk on a Utah college stage, ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News did not mention it. CBS Evening News gave it one sentence, then moved to the next story.
What Happened at Utah Valley University
Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on September 10, 2025, while speaking to students at an outdoor event on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem. He was in the middle of his "American Comeback Tour," the campus speaking circuit that had made him one of the most recognizable conservative organizers of his generation. Tyler Robinson turned himself in the day after the shooting.
A Utah judge ruled on September 1 that there is sufficient evidence for Robinson to stand trial on aggravated murder charges, which makes him eligible for the death penalty if convicted, according to NPR. Utah Governor Spencer Cox declared September 10, 2026, "Charlie Kirk Day" in the state, and Turning Point USA held a memorial at Utah Valley University the same night, per ABC4 Utah.
A memorial outside Turning Point USA's Phoenix headquarters the day after Charlie Kirk's assassination. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
What Aired on the Actual Anniversary
Thursday night, September 10, all three broadcast evening newscasts led with the same story: Republicans gathered in Dallas for the party's first-ever midterm convention, where President Trump promised a $5,000 "Trump Dividend" check to every American adult if the GOP holds Congress. ABC's David Muir opened with it. CBS's Tony Dokoupil opened with it. NBC's Tom Llamas opened with it.
Only one of the three found room for the anniversary. CBS correspondent Ed O'Keefe, reporting live from the convention, closed his segment this way, in a single 25-word sentence, according to the aired transcript published by NewsBusters, the Media Research Center's broadcast-monitoring arm:
"Tonight, this convention also marking one year since the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, someone who inspired many of today's GOP leaders and candidates." — Ed O'Keefe, CBS Evening News, September 10, 2026
ABC World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News, both of which also covered the same convention floor that same night, did not say Kirk's name at all. Neither did either newscast mention that Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, had addressed the Republican convention hours earlier, a genuinely unusual crossover that CBS also covered and NBC noted only in passing.
CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil spent more airtime discussing the convention's price tag than O'Keefe spent on Kirk. "The convention there cost roughly $40 million," Dokoupil told O'Keefe on air, asking whether the first-ever Republican midterm convention would be "effective." That exchange, plus a soundbite from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on whether the dividend plan could pass Congress, ran longer than the entire mention of the anniversary.
David Muir anchors ABC World News Tonight, which opened its September 10 broadcast with President Trump's $5,000 dividend proposal and did not mention the Charlie Kirk anniversary. (GtmnPhotos, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
Plenty of Airtime for a Different Story
The silence on Kirk was not for lack of time. ABC's Mary Bruce filed a multi-soundbite package on the dividend plan, running clips of Trump, Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia, Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Senator Susan Collins criticizing the proposal, plus a line noting the national debt had "just hit a historic $40 trillion." NBC's Ryan Nobles did the same, adding a soundbite from Garcia calling Trump "the biggest liar to ever serve in government" and closing with a jab at how long Trump's convention speech had run.
Both networks had time to quote two Democratic lawmakers, a Fox News anchor and a skeptical Republican senator by name on a single funding proposal. Neither had a sentence left for the anniversary of a political assassination that happened at the same event both newscasts were already covering.
The Sunday Shows Already Set the Tone
This was not an isolated slip. Four days earlier, on Sunday, September 6, ABC's This Week was the only one of the major Sunday political shows, ahead of CBS's Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press and CNN's State of the Union, to devote any airtime to the approaching anniversary, according to NewsBusters' review of that week's broadcasts.
Host Martha Raddatz used the segment to interview Utah Governor Spencer Cox about his new book, and to press him to condemn a comment Trump made at Kirk's memorial service about not being able to forgive his political opponents. The full aired transcript shows Raddatz never asked Cox to condemn Kirk's killer, and never mentioned Robinson by name, even with the trial ruling only days old.
Not one of the other three shows found room for even that. CBS's Face the Nation, NBC's Meet the Press and CNN's State of the Union all aired that same Sunday, all covered the midterm campaign, and none of them mentioned the coming anniversary at all, according to NewsBusters' review of the broadcasts.
Cox, to his credit, did not take the bait. Asked to react to Trump's remark, he told Raddatz he found it "very transparent" and said he appreciated the honesty, then pivoted to praising the moment Erika Kirk publicly forgave her husband's killer at the memorial. The segment still ran without a single question about the man awaiting trial for the shooting itself.
A World Away From Fox News
Conservative outlets ran the anniversary as a headline story all week. Fox News covered convention attendees' tributes to Kirk on the ground in Dallas, and Fox and Friends First, the network's morning show, brought on Caleb Chilcutt, the former Turning Point USA chapter chair at Utah Valley University, to talk about how the organization has carried on after the shooting. Newsweek and local Utah stations ran their own anniversary retrospectives the same day, cataloging tributes from administration officials and Kirk's widow, Erika.
None of that coverage required an act of courage. It required only a decision that a political assassination's first anniversary, on the anniversary itself, was worth a mention.
The Pattern Is the Story
One sentence on CBS. Zero on ABC. Zero on NBC. Zero on three of the four major Sunday shows four days earlier. None of the three evening newscasts lacked the time; they simply spent it elsewhere, on a funding proposal, on Democratic pushback, on how long a speech ran. A man was shot to death in front of a crowd of students for saying things out loud in public. A year later, the newscasts that spent that same night quoting two sitting Democrats on a stimulus check could not spare a sentence for the anniversary of his death.
That choice, repeated across a week and three different programs, is not an accident of a single busy news night. It is a pattern any reader can check for themselves, because every one of these newscasts publishes its own transcripts and airs its own tape. The evidence is not a leaked memo or an anonymous source. It is what these networks actually said, and did not say, out loud, on camera, on the record.
Viewers who tuned in that Thursday for news about the man who reshaped campus conservatism got a $5,000 campaign promise instead, argued over by the same two Democrats on two different channels. They can decide for themselves what that says about which stories these newsrooms think their audience needs to hear, and which ones they think can wait.
