A 42-year-old Virginia mother named Carmen Lizet Puch was found stabbed to death and doused in gasoline near a jogging trail in Great Falls, Fairfax County. The man arrested for her murder, 19-year-old Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos, is a Salvadoran national who was caught by Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas in April 2024 — and released into the country under the Biden administration.
ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, and CBS Evening News didn't mention it.
That's the first of three anti-Democrat stories the broadcast networks buried this week. And the list gets worse from there.
Cedillos-Campos is a "Salvadoran illegal alien who was caught and released at the border by the Biden admin in El Paso, TX in April." According to reports, Cedillos-Campos and Puch worked together at a local restaurant. He allegedly stole a knife and latex gloves from that restaurant before the attack. Puch had a young daughter.
That's a story about a preventable murder — a mother who would be alive today if a border apprehension in 2024 had ended in deportation instead of release into the country. The networks decided it wasn't worth your time.
But it wasn't the only thing they skipped. A 26-year-old from South Deerfield, Massachusetts named Ryan Michael English was sentenced to 73 months in federal prison for attempting to assassinate Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent with Molotov cocktails fashioned from vodka bottles and a folding knife. English showed up on Capitol grounds armed and ready. Prosecutors had requested 121 months. Judge Rudolph Contreras handed down the 73-month sentence plus three years of supervised release.
An assassination attempt on a sitting cabinet member. Seventy-three months in prison. Zero seconds of evening news coverage.
Then there's Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda, a Tajik national who was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity back in 2019 and committed to the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute. On July 6, 2026, the facility granted him a 48-hour pass. He didn't come back on July 8. Because he'd already obtained a passport during a previous authorized pass in 2024, he was able to board a Turkish Airlines flight from Washington Dulles International Airport to Istanbul, then connect to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. A man found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity used state-approved day passes to acquire travel documents and flee the country.
Three stories. An illegal immigrant charged with stabbing a mother to death. A man sentenced for trying to murder the Treasury Secretary. A killer who escaped a mental facility and flew home to Tajikistan. The networks found time for none of them.
What did make the cut? ABC ran a special segment on the Colorado River. All three networks covered Prince Harry's return to the UK. ABC and NBC provided updates on the death of actress Hayden Panettiere. NBC aired footage of a Cowboys-Saints joint practice brawl. CBS covered a misspelled street sign. ABC showed baby penguins.
The networks would argue these are editorial judgment calls — not every story can make a 22-minute broadcast. Which would be more convincing if the pattern didn't always cut in the same direction. Stories that complicate the narrative on immigration enforcement, political violence from the left, or institutional failure in the justice system consistently end up on the cutting room floor. A misspelled street sign, apparently, does not.
Imagine for a moment that someone had shown up to a Capitol building with Molotov cocktails intending to kill a Biden cabinet member. Imagine the suspect had undergone a gender transition between arraignment and sentencing, as English did. That story would have consumed an entire news cycle. Panel discussions. Expert analysis. Thinkpieces about the rise of domestic extremism. The networks wouldn't have just covered it — they'd have built a week around it.
But it was Scott Bessent. So it was baby penguins.
The broadcast networks aren't failing to find these stories. Bonilla's piece at NewsBusters lays out what was skipped and what aired in its place, and the substitutions tell you everything. These aren't oversights driven by limited airtime. They're choices made by people who understand exactly what they're not showing you.
A mother in Virginia is dead. Her alleged killer was in federal custody two years ago and walked out. A cabinet member's would-be assassin just got sentenced. A murderer used a mental health facility's honor system to book an international flight. And somewhere in a network control room, a producer watched baby penguins waddle across a screen and said, "Yeah, that's the one."