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Well, that was a week we could have all done without.
As President Obama declared in his legitimately moving speech to what seemed to be the homecoming rally of the Arizona Wildcats, now is a time to re-embrace civility.
To that end, now might be a good time to examine the media’s role in this mess. There’s no disputing — nor any surprise — that left-wing activists didn’t need to wait for accurate reporting to jump to conclusions about the “real” culprits in the Tucson massacre. For instance, within minutes of the news hitting the wires, commentator Markos Moulitsas wrote on Twitter, “Mission accomplished, Sarah Palin.” David Brock, the head of a left-wing activist outfit called Media Matters for America, wrote a laughably self-important “open letter” gloating how he had “warned” Fox News about its dangerous rhetoric. Sounding a bit like Dwight Schrute on NBC’s “The Office” penning an urgent letter to the head of the FBI, Brock wrote: “My previous warnings were laughed off and ignored. For the country’s sake, I hope you take them more seriously now.”
Of course, activists and pundits play a different role than allegedly straight reporters. And yet, the “mainstream media” seemed to be suffering from the same groupthink. Even as evidence mounted that Jared Lee Loughner was no Tea Partier, was not a Sarah Palin disciple, and didn’t even listen to talk radio or watch cable news, media outlets seemed to tighten their grip on the story they wanted rather than the story they had. At the end of the week MSNBC was still using a graphic for its news coverage showing Loughner’s deranged mug shot along with the text “The Power of Words.”
Confirmation bias is a problem for all people and institutions of all ideological stripes, but in this instance it is synonymous with liberal media bias. Richard Nixon reportedly once said that it was obvious the world is overcrowded, because everywhere he went he saw huge crowds. Similarly, reporters “knew” beforehand that this must have been a right-wing nut, and so, like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, they recognized only evidence that proved their theory.
They also took cues from such authorities as the editors of The New York Times, who assured readers discomfited by the lack of evidence that it was still OK to blame Republicans for the crime (an approach the Times describes as “Islamophobic” when killers are Muslim). Maybe the lucid-dreamer Loughner lived “well beyond usual ideological categories,” but that’s no reason not “to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.”
This was something of a fatwah for straight reporters and TV hosts to stay focused on Sarah Palin and Republican rhetoric generally. They used the weaselly rationalization that the murders had started a “national debate” on the political discourse. But this is somewhere between an outright lie and a wild distortion. Loughner’s actions didn’t spark the conversation, the media (and the Democratic Party) sparked that conversation because they were already locked into a storyline, like a newspaper that has already written an obituary for a still living actor. “People are debating” or a “national conversation has started” is a cheap gimmick for the author — or his editor — to talk about whatever they want to talk about. If The New York Times ran an untrue story tomorrow announcing that I beat my wife, it would be the Times that sparked the conversation about my wife-beating, not anything I did.
And this is hardly an isolated incident. It’s understandable that journalists would want to set the national agenda by providing new information. That’s their job. But sometimes the press just won’t take no for an answer, when the public refuses to see events the same way. For instance, last summer the Times worked valiantly to cast the Ground Zero mosque controversy as a symptom of Islamophobia sweeping the nation, even though the data on anti-Muslim hate-crimes undercut the claim entirely. The press routinely floats the idea that the country needs a “frank” or “honest” “national conversation on race” but viciously punishes anybody who says something they don’t want to hear. It seems every week there’s another thumb-sucking seminar on public radio about how dismaying it is that the public doesn’t share the elite press’ global warming hysteria. Despite the fact that ObamaCare was persistently unpopular, it seemed news reports often focused on how the public didn’t understand what’s good for them. Last month, The Washington Post refused to print the results of its own poll, showing that ObamaCare was at an all-time low in popularity. And, right now newspapers are debating whether they should adopt “undocumented immigrant” instead of “illegal immigrant” not because the latter term is inaccurate but because they think their readers will fall for the subtle manipulation.
Just because everyone at the Huffington Post and The New York Times reader forums is regurgitating the same pre-baked narrative isn’t proof the narrative is right, it’s just proof that everyone in the bubble needs to get out more.
Indeed, it’s deeply reassuring (though no doubt dismaying to the Times, MSNBC and other outlets), that the American people didn’t buy it. After three days of “discourse hysteria” a CBS poll released Tuesday found that 57% of Americans found the killing unrelated to the political discourse. By Friday a poll by Quinnipiac found that only 15% of Americans blamed the murder spree on “heated political rhetoric.” A generation or two ago, this would never have happened.
The myth that JFK was killed by a “climate of hate” — a common falsehood endlessly repeated this week (Kennedy was murdered by a communist) — was made possible by a near monopolistic control of the press by people who all thought the same way. Today, thanks to the breakdown of the old monopoly and the rise of the Internet and a conservative-leaning alternative media, such instant mythmaking is a lot more difficult. Indeed a lot of “extremist” discourse is really just inconvenient truth-telling by political opponents the liberal establishment would rather not hear from.
Obviously, even The New York Times eventually got the story right, and the facts eventually won out (though apologies have yet to materialize). But it is also abundantly clear that many of the people and institutions piously speechifying about the desperate need to moderate the political discourse had no problem falsely indicting others in a horrendous murder, not because they knew the charge was true but solely because they desperately wanted it to be.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online.