Media hitsen extremisten op?

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

June 14, 2009
Heb recent hier al twee berichten over gestuurd, nu ook in de NYT verslag
over de rol van FOX News :(
Ben benieuwd wat de reacties zullen zijn op de uitspraken van Netanyahu
vandaag.

Groet / Cees

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14rich.html?_r=2
Op-Ed Columnist
The Obama Haters’ Silent Enablers
By FRANK RICH

WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail
traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up”
Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe
we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.

The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the
bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his
highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very
occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale
mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the
network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided,
loudly.

What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and
more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season.
>From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate
that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it
sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally
born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith
said.

Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that
abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s
performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George
Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of
things about the president of the United States ...” He left the rest of
that chilling sentence unsaid.

These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated
star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby
killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the
doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant,
stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link
him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of
blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political
correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in
Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new
president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation.
Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he
inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across
the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of
Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational,
cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century
itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to
his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be
frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe
in.

We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd
is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume
that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their
most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest
murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went
on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been
indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name
with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the
McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was
“palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of
it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented
her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi
skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks
before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate
ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the
invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille
Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a
shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens
toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon,
“there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush
Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about
how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an
elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both
shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs.
Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s
policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final
solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s
rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the
Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck
also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as
if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and
radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this
poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a
former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national
chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans
should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the
negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis
pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad
thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a
description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in
slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a
mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The
president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his
speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal
attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s
adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the
judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the
Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom
Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and
portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed
Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an
aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that
in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations
reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent
former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot,
who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most
consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville
Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may
still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement
known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with
Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material
support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the
law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is?
Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a
shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country
reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits,
recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really
a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to
repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss
any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only
voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might
— belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as
McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in
right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s
future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with
silence.

It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the
Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically,
prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the
conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the
words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last
week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders
nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt
Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned,
let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight
with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to
“bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is
toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not
even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.

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