Exodus 20:16 "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."
It goes without saying that the Arizona shooting was a shocking tragedy. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at point blank range by a lone gunman intent on causing as much harm as possible. Six people died and 14 were injured before the heroic efforts of ordinary citizens brought the carnage to a halt. Jared Loughnane was arrested and charged with numerous US federal and state crimes including murder and manslaughter. Justice will no doubt follow its due process with hopefully an appropriate outcome at its conclusion. Meanwhile, we will pray for the speedy recovery of all who survived this shocking outrage.
Now I am not a journalist, nor am I a trained wordsmith in any way. At best, I can be described as a two bit blogger whose influence is really rather limited in the grand scheme of things. What I am, though, is a news consumer. I read news and analysis online and in print, I watch television news from here and abroad, and I listen to the odd radio newscast as well. As one who readily consumes news, I think I am a more than reasonable judge of the quality of reporting, both excellent and not so excellent. Sadly, I feel the Arizona shooting reporting left a lot to be desired.
Thinking back as far as primary school, I can recall my teacher telling the class that writing a composition is a matter of telling the reader the answer to a number of basic questions – who, what, when, where, how, and why. For the journalist, this should be second nature. Ask the questions, dig a little deeper, ask them again, and get to the heart of the story recording and reporting only the facts. Where there is no answer forthcoming at the time, report that lack of information and keep asking the questions until there is an answer. Instead, what we got from many sources was a mixture of fact and speculation with intent to blame.
The Arizona shooting story should have been factual and apolitical, but some journalists took it upon themselves to point the finger of blame at… Sarah Palin. How on earth did they draw that conclusion? By not asking the basic questions, using presumption to build a framework for a questionable conclusion, then working backwards to fill in the gaps with or without evidence to support. Just like this – a crazed shooter who guns down a Democrat congresswoman at a civic rally must logically be ideologically and politically opposed the victim, therefore can only be a radical conservative. All the radical conservatives are collected together under the banner of the Tea Party movement, which happens to have Sarah Palin as a figurehead. Conveniently, it had been noted that Sarah Palin had used crosshairs on an electoral map to target particular seats that were winnable in the 2010 mid term elections. Lo and behold, the state of Arizona was lined up in the scope in what these journalists would have you believe is an incitement to violence, evidenced by one of Palin’s followers accomplishing the mission. All of this reported as fact with only the electoral map as concrete evidence. Nauseating stuff…
I was appalled at the narrow mindedness of these journalists. There were other far more plausible possibilities that absolutely nobody discussed. Nobody speculated that the Jewish congresswoman could have been shot by a supremacist. Nobody asserted that this crime could have been a copycat of the assassination of Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province days before. Even the basic random slaying by a nutcase was barely touched upon. Instead, it fell to Sarah Palin.
Meanwhile, responsible journalists were doing the right thing in determining the facts about not only the event itself, but the accused gunman Jared Loughnane. They trawled his various websites and spoke to those who knew him to build a picture of who this young man was and what his motivations may have been. The picture that emerged was that of a mentally unstable and irrational person who had some significant political obsessions and more than a little angst. Nothing could be found of any link with Sarah Palin or the Tea Party movement, his online writings revealed that his political leanings were not aligned with conservative views, and he had had limited association with Congresswoman Giffords in the past. All of these facts were not enough to slow the “Blame Palin” juggernaut that was reported all over the world.
Those journalists accusing Palin are saying that the crosshair target motif (above) used by Sarah Palin was irresponsible and it would be fair to say that it was unwise. Others are saying that the vitriol and minacity of certain groups (read conservatives) is raising the stakes to bring violence to the fore in politics. Those voices are indeed loud but I question their partisanship on the issue. It seems that only conservatives are accused of this sort of conduct. While censuring fingers point at Sarah Palin and her electoral map, memories are conveniently erased concerning the Democratic Party’s bullseye electoral map (below), targeting the states that Senator John Kerry had to win to take the White House in 2004. Nobody declared that map to be irresponsible. In the same way, nobody accused President Obama of inciting violence when he said that Democrats would bring a gun to the fight with Republicans.
As for Sarah Palin, she has been hung as an effigy, threatened with gang rape, and had her children held up as objects of scorn and derision, yet her protests were brushed off as freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The same journalists making such a fuss now failed to give attention to this very issue when it was at its most virulent during the 2008 Presidential campaign. The meticulous detail of reporting one side of politics with an unhealthy cynicism versus a softly, softly approach to reporting the other leaves the casual news consumer with the impression that all the ratbags are only on one side. The reality is that there are ratbags on both sides of politics, and some of them work in the media.
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