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So, if Jared Loughner's beef with Gabrielle Giffords dates back to a 2007 snub…if it concerns Orwellian notions of linguistic mind control…if it predates the healthcare reform debate over which Giffords' district office was vandalized…if it predates the gunshot sights over Giffords' district posted by Sarah Palin as part of the midterm election campaign…how did the nightly newscasts manage to shoehorn this lone local incident of political violence into a national political narrative?
ABC assigned Jake Tapper to try to do the job from the White House. CBS handed the task to longtime politics watcher Jeff Greenfield. NBC chose Andrea Mitchell, doyenne of its DC bureau.
The hook was the statement by Sheriff Clarence Dupnik of Pima County. NBC's Mitchell noted that "the issue blew up right after the shooting with the Tucson sheriff's first briefing. He lit up the Internet by blaming the media"…"As the first shock waves from the story were spreading, the words of that county sheriff helped set off an incendiary debate," CBS' Greenfield recalled…ABC's Tapper called Dupnik "among the first to take up this charge" quoting the sheriff thus: "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country, is getting to be outrageous."
Dupnik's argument was that incendiary political rhetoric, ad hominem figurative attacks on politicians, and verbal assaults against the institutions of government create an atmosphere in which literal political violence is no longer taboo. ABC' Tapper quoted Rep James Clyburn (D-SC) paraphrasing the sheriff thus: "The vitriol has gotten so elevated until people feel emboldened." CBS' Greenfield turned to campaign visuals, noting that "the image of the gun as a symbol of resistance is broadly popular." NBC's Mitchell had the money soundbite from an interview Rep Giffords herself gave to MSNBC in protest against Palin's graphics: "The way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun over our district. When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action."
This hypothesis concerning the possibility that literal violence is facilitated by rhetorical violence spawned the blame game and the dilemma of false equivalency. False equivalency: are all participants in political discourse equally responsible for its tone? The blame game: are some partisans more culpable than others?
CBS' Greenfield used history to thread this needle. He argued that anti-government violence had been a rhetorical favorite of "some intellectuals on the left" a generation ago but that "these days the harshest words about government usually come from the right." He quoted Newt Gingrich and FOX News Channel's Dick Morris by name.
NBC's Mitchell also quoted FNC, giving Glenn Beck an opportunity to defend himself against those in "the media" who fail to find equivalency between left and right and instead seek to locate blame among his allies: "They are desperately using every opportunity to try to convince you that, somehow or another, Sarah Palin is dangerous." Mitchell also quoted Palin herself denouncing the "BS coming from the lamestream media lately about us inciting violence." Mitchell is quoting a couple of straw men here. No one called Palin dangerous; no one accused her of inciting violence. Giffords' charge was reckless use of rhetoric and imagery. Mitchell's report was inclined not to cast blame but to find equivalency instead, characterizing the controversy as a "debate over political speech between right and left."
ABC's Tapper, too, characterized the argument as one about "ugly talk in the political arena" generally speaking, not about the culpability of a certain set of partisans. Tapper heard conservative talkradio level "charges of political opportunism" against Giffords' Democratic colleagues. Tapper quoted Rush Limbaugh's warning that concerns about inflammatory rhetoric were a stalking horse: "What this is all about is shutting down any and all political opposition and eventually criminalizing it." Tapper did not comment on the credibility of Limbaugh's warning.
Personally, I think that Sheriff Dupnik's media criticism reached too far, generalizing, in a state of grief, from one particularly toxic corner of the southwest about the national mood of the body politic. That is not to endorse the violence-riddled gun-addled discourse in the most paranoid precincts of reactionary conservatism. Of course their rhetoric should be more moderate--but that would be true with or without the Tragedy in Tucson. Linking such language to these killings, by making such over-the-top hypotheses about their influence, makes the mistake of elevating its speakers to a status of self-righteous victimhood.
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