The media misses a good opportunity to keep quiet

The Tucson shootings prove that the press has a clear bias against conservatives

In February 2003, French President Jacques Chirac insulted Eastern European governments after they backed the imminent invasion of Iraq by the United States, accusing them of acting irresponsibly and "frivolously" by speaking up. "They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet," Chirac scolded. His comments created a backlash in the European Union and became a new standard of French arrogance. The criticism, however, is a fitting judgment of the media's performance in covering the Tucson shootings, which killed six people and wounded fourteen others, including Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat who had just won re-election to the House in a hard-fought midterm race.

Almost from the moment the story broke, the press attempted to fit it into a narrative about incendiary political rhetoric. Never mind that no evidence arose to connect the shooting to any particular political campaign, movement or organization in the first few hours after the massacre, nor has any come to light in the days since. Like most people behind these types of attacks, the suspect turns out to be a loner with a history of mental illness and scrapes with the law. This one has held a grudge against Giffords since 2007, when she failed to give him a satisfactory response to his questions about how the government uses grammar for mind control. Even after these facts came to light, the media and the commentariat decided that political rhetoric simply had to be the cause of the shooting, whether evidence for that theory existed or not.

To some extent, this is a byproduct of the news cycle in the internet age, as well as the result of human nature. When a disturbing tragedy occurs, people attempt to make sense of the insensible by fitting it into their preferred paradigm. When the people in question are delivering news analysis and commentary by the minute, the temptation to make the shooting of an elected official into an act of political passion can be powerful, especially since delusional madness as an answer is so unsatisfying.

But that element of human nature doesn’t explain it all. For instance, when the news of the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009 broke, CNN repeatedly warned its viewers against jumping to conclusions. Their reporters and guests, including former Gen. Wesley Clark, reporter Jane Velez-Mitchell, analyst Robert Baer, and anchor John Roberts repeated these warnings for two days. The New York Times editorialized the next day to warn readers to wait "until the investigations are complete" before drawing any lessons from the shooting and predicted that "there may never be an explanation."