That quote, from a commenter at my personal blog, described
the effort of several news organizations to fabricate a connection
between Jared
Loughner’s murderous rampage and the Tea Party and/or Sarah
Palin.
Less than four hours transpired between the time the
shootings occurred in the parking lot of a Tucson grocery
store and the time the Associated Press identified 22-year-old
Loughner as the suspect. The first AP bulletin to identify him
misspelled his name “Laughner,” and another couple of
hours passed while reporters, bloggers and amateur newshounds
corrected the spelling and began to assemble enough background on
Loughner to get some idea of what inspired this crime.
Jared Loughner is crazy.
That simple four-word sentence adequately summarizes Loughner’s
apparent motives. However, in the five or six hours between
the shooting — in which Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was
among a dozen people wounded, and six people including a
federal judge were killed — some reporters apparently felt
obligated to fill the information void with reporting that fed into
a frenzy of political speculation.
Yes, it is a fact that Giffords was one of the Democrats on a
“target” list of incumbents whom Sarah Palin opposed in the
recent mid-term election. Yes, it is a fact that the election
between Giffords and Republican Jesse Kelly was hotly contested,
with Giffords winning by fewer than 4,000 votes. Yes, it is a fact
that Kelly was supported by the Tea Party movement. Yes, it is a
fact that immigration is a major political issue in
Arizona.
All of those facts that were fed into online
reports and TV news coverage were indisputably true. And all
of those facts, it seems, were irrelevant to Loughner’s bloody
crime.
There is no evidence that Loughner was a Sarah Palin fan. There
is no evidence that he was associated with the Tea Party or that he
was concerned with immigration. Instead, there is a steadily
growing heap of
evidence that Jared Loughner was suffering from a mental
illness, quite possibly paranoid schizophrenia.
One of Loughner’s classmates in high school and community
college, Caitie Parker, voided much of the baseless media
speculation with a few Twitter messages Saturday afternoon. Parker,
herself a liberal, said Loughner was “a
really good friend,” whom she described as having been
“left
wing,” ”a
political radical” and “quite
liberal” when she knew him, although she lost touch with him
after 2007 when he “became
very reclusive.” Loughner was a “loner”
and a “pot
head,” Parker said in a Twitter colloquy with Anthony De Rosa
of Reuters.
There was
clear evidence that Loughner’s mental condition was
deteriorating. “He disrupted class frequently with nonsensical
outbursts,” said one student who had attended a pre-algebra class
at Pima Community College with Loughner. In mid-December, Loughner
wrote on his MySpace page, “I don’t feel good: I’m ready to
kill a police officer!”
In his recent online activity — including a series of
YouTube video texts transcribed by conservative blogger Warner Todd
Huston — Loughner unloaded paranoid gibberish about
brainwashing and “mind control.” Loughner listed Mein
Kampf and the Communist Manifesto among his favorite
books. At one point in his ravings, apparently in reference to the
“In God We Trust” motto on U.S. currency, he exclaimed:
“No! I won’t trust in God!”
None of this lines up with the early reporting on the Tucson
shooting which heavily implied that
Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others were shot because of political
activity of Palin and the Tea Party. And yet none of the news
organizations that fed that frenzy of speculation has apologized
for their irresponsible reporting.
