By Jorge Bonilla

During a segment that was mostly about the various security failures that facilitated the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey made a point insufficiently expressed on the media: that if there is any rhetorical cooling to happen, it must also happen among “media personalities.”

Watch as Ramsey closes out his segment on CNN with that trenchant observation:

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CHARLES RAMSEY: You know, we don’t need something like this to happen again. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat or Republican. All of us should be outraged at the fact that an elected official or potential elected official, former president, was targeted for assassination. That should not happen in the United States of America, period. And anything any of us can do to prevent that from happening in the future. And certainly our elected officials and activists and even media personalities need to tone it down. You’ve got a lot of people out there that are mentally unstable and they hear all this rhetoric, and they take it upon themselves to do something. That is fund- that that is a huge part of the problem. It goes beyond establishing perimeters and having snipers in place and all that sort of thing. We’ve created an environment now where violence is something that we can actually expect to happen. And that is incredibly unfortunate.

The media have, so far, resisted calls to self-reflect upon their role in superheating our current political environment. In some cases, they even go so far as to cite debunked hoaxes as a reason for the current state of political rhetoric.

This makes Ramsey’s call to responsibility that much more important. He comes on CNN as an authority figure and says what we’ve all been saying over the past two days. In fairness, his call did include elected officials and activists. But the media need to take responsibility if there is indeed going to be a rhetorical “cooling down” at this critical juncture. Here’s hoping that they take the hint.