The Media’s Shooting Bias

From Charles C. W. Cooke of National Review:

Let me venture a guess, and wager that you have heard very little about the political preference of the young man who, on Friday, walked into his high school and tried to murder his teacher.

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For the most part, the media observe well the distinction between political and apolitical killings, and understand the different reactions they demand. Except, that is, when a shooting is carried out by someone suspected of being a conservative. Then, all discipline goes out the window; then, the act simply must have been caused by ideology; then, our television shows are filled with endless discussions of causes thrice removed, and we are subjected to earnest remonstrances about “rhetoric” and “climate” and, heaven forfend, “tone.”

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Last week, the lawyer Gabriel Malor compiled a list of recent events that have been unthinkingly blamed on the Right. Among them are the case of census-taker Bill Sparkman, who hanged himself in Kentucky (the Tea Party was blamed); the case of Joe Stack, a devotee of The Communist Manifesto who flew a plane into an IRS building in 2010 (anti-tax rhetoric was blamed); the case of Obama voter Amy Bishop, who in 2010 shot her fellow faculty members at the University of Alabama (the Tea Party was blamed); the case of misanthropic environmentalist James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel (climate-change “deniers” were blamed); and the Boston Marathon bombing, which was carried out by jihadists — after right-wingers were blamed and a non-existent and wholly coincidental link with Patriot’s Day was mooted.

Perhaps the most famous of these false accusations came from ABC News’ Brian Ross, who was quick to note, in the wake of the 2012 movie-theater massacre, that the name of “a Jim Holmes of Aurora” had been found “on the Colorado Tea Party site.” “Now,” Ross said, “we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes” as the one who’d carried out the atrocity. “But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.” And, as anyone sensible knows, the first place you look for clues when there has been a shooting is the Tea Party.

At least Ross actually had a name with which to work. Other armchair detectives have been even less thorough. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner shot Representative Gabby Giffords and murdered six people in Tuscon, Ariz., conservative Americans were instantaneously treated to inane lectures about “right-wing rhetoric” — despite there being no link whatsoever between the shooter and any sort of “rhetoric.” Meanwhile, the Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman went one further, blaming Sarah Palin personally. Elsewhere, the most dull campaign rhetoric — stuff that is used routinely by both sides — was transmuted into hard evidence of guilt and complicity. “Look at that politician over there. He said ‘target’!”

Wow, most of these mass shootings have been motivated by socialists and leftist...... but that's never mentioned.