Time to get beyond blaming Fox News

When they kick down your front door, / How’re you gonna come? / With your hands on your head, or / On the trigger of your gun?

–The Clash

Richard Poplawski is the lone gunman from Pittsburgh’s Stanton Heights neighborhood accused of killing three Pittsburgh police officers on April 4. News reports said this discharged Marine, unemployed and by all indications very confused, had gotten into an argument with his mother, who he lived with at the time. Their argument itself was inconsequential — Richard’s dog had urinated in the house and he hadn’t cleaned up after it. But Richard became irate. His fury worried her. She called the police. When the police showed up at the Poplawskis’ door, Richard allegedly opened fire, killing two officers immediately. Four hours of hell ensued — a firefight between an untold number of City of Pittsburgh Police Officers and Richard Poplawski, who had been stockpiling firearms, and who was now ducking in and out of shot-out windows to return police fire. Fairfield Street — a narrow, two-lane, tree-lined, dead-end residential road where cars are parked neatly on street sides and houses are generally separated by 20 or 30 feet of landscaped greenery — had become a warzone. Homes were evacuated as systematically and carefully as possible while Poplawski’s gun battle raged. By the time Poplawski was captured, another officer was dead and several others were injured. Poplawski had sustained gunshot wounds to his legs. He was eventually charged with three counts of criminal homicide and nine counts of attempted homicide, and his ordeal had placed him squarely into national discussion:

Rumors suggested he had worried that the Obama administration would take away his gun rights. Did his firefight with the Pittsburgh Police represent the future of a violent right-wing revolution? Were his worries similar to those of a growing, angry conservative insurgency within the United States?

When I hear or read the insinuation that Fox News is somehow responsible for (and should therefore apologize for) “fueling” incidents like Poplawski’s, I begin to worry.

In my opinion, media reflects society; Fox News’ opinionated talkers — Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, et al — emulate the culture they serve. Their livelihoods are based around viewership, after all — around how many people watch their shows, and what kinds of advertising their content decisions can support. When these decisions become countercultural — when these men do or say something to forcefully displease their audience or their corporate overseers — you can assume they’ll be fired. (Consider Michael Savage’s MSNBC fate: when he told a caller, “You should only get AIDS and die, you pig,” his increasingly hateful speech became too much for his mainstream audience to bear. Advertising pulled out, and so MSNBC let him go. He was relegated back to talk radio, to address an astoundingly large fringe. And that’s where he is now.)

Hannity, Linbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, and even Savage and Pittsburgh-based right-winger, Jim Quinn (not all necessarily members of the Fox News network, but all certainly in the same category) are political barkers rather than revolutionaries. They talk about relatively instigative issues (abortion, Freedom, suppression of gay rights, the Christian family ideal, their doubts about the legitimacy of global warming, etc.) and make insinuations about the evils of liberalism. But their secondary goal — behind viewership/listenership, of course, which is always first — isn’t some violent overthrow of the government. Instead, I’d argue they seek to agitate heated discussion and to jostle more Republican votes toward major elections.

Not to say their words can’t be dangerous. Indeed, regarding the argument over Bill O’Reilly’s coverage of Dr. George Tiller (who was murdered on May 30th), Mary Alice Carr wrote in the Washington Post, “When you tell an audience of millions over and over again that someone is an executioner, you cannot feign surprise when someone executes that person.”

That seems true. But is it also an argument for O’Reilly to be taken off the air? I don’t think so. Carr doesn’t say so. And to place blame on O’Reilly distracts the investigation from where it should lie — on Scott Roeder, the accused murderer with a history of violence and armed resistance. O’Reilly didn’t kill anyone, let’s remember. If you want to use his demonization of Tiller as a reason to boycott his show, that’s a reasonable and rational response. But consider that overt demonization of O’Reilly likely leads to nothing but more photos of his grinning face splayed on every political Web site in the country.

At issue, really, is the power of words. And that’s why we must be careful with our words. With regard to political discussion, there will always be those like Richard Poplawski, who just need that one… last… shove to push them over the edge, into horrifying infamy. But blaming some bloviating dude on Fox News seems to miss the mark. Why suppress words — and call for apologies that will likely never happen — when, instead, you can encourage education, engagement, and diverse study in a culture of homogenous thinking?

Getting back to Poplawski: If we’re to throw any sort of media blame toward unified right-wing violence (which, again, I recommend against), it shouldn’t go toward Hannity, O’Reilly, and their mainstream conservative peers. No, Poplawski isn’t especially a fan of theirs. He is, however, a fan of Alex Jones’ Prison Planet/Infowars. If you’re unfamiliar, have a look: today, a top story is headlined, “Vulgar Commentators Pounce On Shooting To Justify DHS Extremism Report.” They’re talking about the Holocaust shooting, which, as you know, involved an armed, octogenarian, racist, former Navyman. Steve Watson, a writer for Prison Planet, boils the argument down to:

…those attempting to exploit this awful tragedy to score political points, whether it be from the right or the left, is so far beyond contemptible, it defies belief.  Meanwhile, the corporate and financial elite are happy to play both sides off against each other while they carry on, almost completely undeterred, with their freedom destroying Social Darwinist agenda.”

Prison Planet regularly guerrilla-markets black stickers imprinted with white typewriter font that says “9/11 was an inside job.” And, for the most part, that’s the core of their message: that corporations and political parties rule ruthlessly over our lives. In short, 1) the Bush Administration orchestrated 9/11 to gain political capital, 2) the U.S. government is trying to ban guns because they want you weak and sedate and powerless, and 3) a small group of international socialists is attempting to govern the world and repress your personal freedoms. In the organization’s own words, Alex Jones himself is:

…a dedicated and aggressive Constutionalist [who] consistently defends the Bill of Rights, property rights, and our nation’s borders. In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, Jones passionately argues against foreign entanglements and wars for the sake of corporate and banking interests. Jones avoids the bogus political labels of ‘left and right’ and instead focuses on what really matters — what’s right and wrong.”

This is getting way too far outside my person realm of interest to explore in further detail (“U.S. prison reform” is my primary interest at the moment, thank you), but this Esquire piece by Stephen Marche does a good job synopsizing the dangers of both conspiracy theories and ascribing too much credit to those who deserve little:

Any profession of belief in a conspiracy has become, automatically, a sign of dangerous delusion. Napoleon said that you should never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence, and the one positive legacy of the Bush years is that no one can sensibly believe in a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ anymore. When they wheeled away Dick Cheney after Obama’s inauguration, he was a Strangelovian symbol of all that is cruel and vicious, but who could say he ran the world? Who could still believe that Bush was capable enough to conspire? He could barely speak in complete sentences. The world is falling apart around us, and we are repulsed and attracted in equal measure by the idea of secret workings behind the collapse: We crave having someone to blame but recognize that our craving is fantastic. So we cower in conspiratorial delusions that we know cannot be true. If only there were a conspiracy, pop culture screams, if only there were a secret mechanism holding everything together. ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality,’ T. S. Eliot wrote. The reality we can’t bear to look at, however, isn’t hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything but the more terrifying truth that there are no hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything. It’s our deepest form of escapism to imagine a world in which we are powerless, because it excuses our selfishness. The real nightmare is that no one is to blame for the state of the world but ourselves.”