THE CLIMATE OF MEDIA DISHONESTY

A media darling one day, an unperson the next. Eric Fuller’s moment in the spotlight was very short.

The Associated Press did a story a week ago Friday (1/14) on the charge Mr. Fuller made on an obscure left-wing radio program (Democracy Now!) that conservatives were responsible for the shooting spree in Tucson that left six people dead and 14 others — including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — injured.  It was a major topic of discussion on MSNBC that night.

"It looks like (Sarah) Palin, (Glenn) Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target," Mr. Fuller said.

Mr. Fuller made this charge days after it was clear the shooter, Jared Loughner, was mentally ill, didn’t listen to talk radio, had a grudge against Rep. Giffords that predated Ms. Palin’s arrival on the national scene, admired the Communist Manifesto, hated President Bush, and opposed the Iraq war.  A former classmate described Mr. Loughner as "a left-wing pothead."

So why did some journalists play up a disproved charge made by someone you never heard of on a radio program few listen to?

Because Mr. Fuller was one of those 14 wounded in the Tucson massacre.  This gave journalists the opportunity to recycle a meme many began to push before anything was known about Mr. Loughner: that "harsh" rhetoric from conservatives had created "a climate of hate" that pushed him over the edge.

But Mr. Fuller ceased to be useful when he was arrested the next day for making a death threat against Tucson Tea Party leader Trent Humphries.

Though Mr. Loughner wasn’t political, Mr. Fuller is. He’s a long time liberal activist.

Liberals are more likely to threaten violence against conservatives than the other way round, if comments on blogs  (or MSNBC programs) are a measure.

But whenever there is a horrific crime, journalists rush to blame conservatives for it.

When James von Brunn shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. in June of 2009, the airwaves were filled with denunciations of the Tea Party and talk radio.  Mr. von Brunn was a 9/11 Truther who hated George Bush and Fox News, and who had made threats against the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

When Joseph Andrew Stack flew his plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas last February, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart and Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton suggested he’d been motivated by Tea Party rhetoric. 

Mr. Stack’s "suicide manifesto" indicated that if he had any at all, his politics, like Mr. Loughner’s, were left wing.  He had no connections to the Tea Party or any other conservative group.

Earlier that month Prof. Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, prompting former Reuters Foundation Fellow Jonathan Curiel to ask: "Does racism explain the tenure shooting and the Tea Party movement?"

"A family source said Bishop…was a far-left political extremist who was obsessed with President Obama," the Boston Herald reported.

There was less violence before talk radio, the Internet, and Fox News, implied National Public Radio anchor Scott Simon.  Shootings like that in Arizona didn’t happen, he said, when "63 million people watched (CBS News anchor) Walter Cronkite each night."

Mr. Cronkite was most popular during the 1960s, a decade in which President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert were assassinated, as were Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and George Wallace was crippled in an assassination attempt.

New York Times columnist James Reston and CBS correspondent Dan Rather, among others, blamed the Kennedy assassination on "the climate of hate" created by conservatives in Dallas. 

Mr. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a communist peeved with the president for his hostility toward Fidel Castro.

Death threats against Sarah Palin have spiked, an aide said.  Could this be because so many in the media have accused her of inciting murder in Arizona?

To make such an accusation without a shred of evidence is despicable.  To continue to make that accusation after the evidence disproves it is beyond despicable.

Yet the same journalists who have behaved so despicably have anointed themselves arbiters of what constitutes civil discourse in our politics.

It’s time for journalists to stop lecturing us on civility; time for them to start practicing it.

Oh, by the way.  On that same day Eric Fuller gave that highly publicized interview to the obscure leftie radio show, he also was interviewed by the New York Post, which proceeded to bury his comments in an upbeat story about Rep. Giffords’ improving condition.

Somehow the entire liberal "major media" avoided informing its readers, listeners, or viewers that Mr. Fuller wanted top Republican figures to be tortured and their ears severed.  Only Fox News featured Mr. Fuller’s words:

"There would be torture and then an ear necklace, with Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin’s ears toward the end, because they’re small, female ears, and then Limbaugh, Hannity and the biggest ears of all, Cheney’s, in the center."

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.