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Eliminationist Rhetoric and the Culpability of Media Figures
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The right wing pundits draw a large portion of their audience from the undereducated and economically marginal. These people are also the most likely to be hit hard if the economy continues to worsen. If things get bad, you'll see a lot more incidents like this.
The point isn't in comparing the intensity/loudness/pull of current extremism amongst the far right to extremism in the far left, but in noting that extremism or eliminationist rhetoric isn't at all tied to/more prevalent in a particular ideology.
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That kind of goes back to my first post, though. Nobody denies that there are loonies on the Left. The issue is what about the people who hold actual positions of power on that side. There are arsonists for the environment (which is beyond an oxymoron) but I can't think of an elected official with a D after their name advocating a resurgent HUAC to investigate conservatives. The same cannot be said for elected Republican members of Congress. Nor are progressives on TV (all 2 of them) or the radio faux burning someone alive and asking Obama to just shoot us all in the head and get it over with like Beck has done.
Yeah, this whole board is full of assholes at times. Me, you, that asshole over there. And that's true across the board in terms of politics. But there should still be such a thing as standards, and far too many far right mouthpieces have been looking at the underneath of that subfloor.
If you want to see what is a dogwhistle and what isn't, look at the way free republic posters respond to things. The connotation of that is "we're sorry he didn't repent his sinful baby-killing ways before this guy murdered him. we hope the family renouncies this man's life work before they burn in hell, too." And you continue to delegitimize people who believe differently than the extreme right-wing, which makes it more OK to kill someone. The first step in political violence is dehumanizing the other.
Which probably wouldn't stop the hypothetical recipient from feeling insulted or angry or whatever, but that's what it is.
With your creepy zealots, however - ie, the violent and those who defend violent actions - they're probably just trying to sound forgiving and benificent, and using the language of their more moderate brethren to do it. To someone who isn't familiar with the subculture in question it's going to sound almost impossible to tell the difference, but of course that's true with all subcultures.
You may not know this, but the eliminationist hypothesis floating on 'the lefty internets' holds that there are actual differences between the nature of left moonbats and right wingnuts.
To quote a book review:
I'm not actually sure how well this thesis plays out re: Dr. Tiller. There were just three people in his 'group', so to speak.
Regardless, this thesis sits next to dogwhistles as Theories About Rhetoric That Are Convincing But Hard To Prove.
The trouble with this discussion is the way that American political discourse attempts to blur the very real distinctions between liberals and leftists. They are two very different - and usually historically opposed - political philosophies.
The far left is quite capable of eliminationist rhetoric and have several murderous totalitarian regimes and terrorist groups under their belts while liberals, by their very nature, tend to favor moderation. That doesn't mean that they are saints. The U.S. government from WWII to Nixon was extremely liberal and was not above sponsoring coups of elected socialist governments and cozying up to right wing dictators. But liberals do not have a track record of demonizing their domestic opponents and calling them traitors and murderers.
This is important because there are NO prominent far leftists with access to the mainstream media in the U.S. The closest you'll see is the very rare trotting out of moderate leftists like Chomsky or Nader or leftist-sympathetic entertainers like Garofalo. By contrast, there are personalities that are far more extreme than these with regular access to TV and radio. There are no leftist ideological equivalents that are as extreme as Beck and Limbaught that have any access to airwaves.
Limed for calling out false equivalency.
Evangelicals are hypocrites. An "I'm special and you're not" mode of thinking is kind of required for it.
So one of the reasons you can't find extremely left-wing demagogues advocating violence is that they're marginalised (as perhaps they should be) whereas extremely right-wing demagogues are accepted.
edit: beat'd.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
That's just not true. You know there's an international communist movement that advocates violent revolution, don't you?
Most extreme lefties view Obama as a sop, not a good result.
International though. They have about zero power in the US.
Left wing politics are generally seen as being pretty weak in the US.
I wasn't going to get that far into this argument, but okay. I draw a pretty significant distinction between people who want revolution in a conceptual sense against a government they think is tyrannical (and yes, we saw this during the Bush years), and people like Beck who essentially just advocate violence, and who pick out private individuals by name. Violent maybe, but you don't see eliminationist rhetoric coming from the left.
There is also the point that those left-wing extremists are correctly ignored by everyone.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Anyway apart from the family, I feel sorry for the many women in the US who are almost entirely fucked if their pregnancies go bad suddenly. There's only one other provider in the country now, and good luck getting near them if you're not sufficiently cashed up to travel at the drop of a hat.
Also, and this is a very scary factoid, it seems that Dr. Tiller was murdered on the sixth anniversary of the capture of the infamous Christian fundamentalist terrorist Eric Rudolph. That means that there's even more of a message being sent with his brutal slaying.
That's my point - you don't 'see' left-wing extremist rhetoric in the US because you're not allowed to see left-wing extremist rhetoric.
They still exist. Obviously, in the modern US, hell, the modern developed world, right-wing extremists are a bigger danger. But don't let that make you think left-wing extremists don't kill people they disagree with.
I think the OP suggests the possibility when he asks whether such broadcasters are culpable. Culpability implies censorship, I daresay.
There is also moral culpability, but I don't read the OP as saying that. Is there any doubt, really?
As to practical responses: I presume the idea here is not to fling the FCC at them, since such figures are usually careful to avoid legal missteps. Presumably what we will see, if anything, is political organisation: boycotting such broadcasters (duh) and advertisers that support such broadcasters.
The problem with this - it's easy to degenerate into mutually escalating personal threats. Advertisers seem fair game. But, say, people who grant interviews for such broadcasters? Shareholders of these broadcasting companies? Politicians who refuse to explicitly condemn such broadcasts? These are certainly plausible targets. And even if a boycott-leading organisation decides by consensus to not include such targets for whatever reason, it can't possibly stop smaller factions of anonymous protestors from launching their own death threats, and eventually mutual violence.
Once it becomes believable that significant right-wing wingnut violence is here to stay, there really isn't any other outcome. Liberals can hold the mainstream easily in the face of such attacks, but that doesn't stop bullets. Radicalization is the response to radicalization.
I don't actually think it'll get that far - more likely a few mainstream liberal church leaders will trot about for a while preaching nonviolence, and dogwhistling will temporarily become a little more restrained - but yeah. Watch Limbaugh and Beck carefully over the next few weeks.
I have my doubts about treating the MSM as a monolithic entity with any persistent ideological interest in anything besides generating eyeballs and thereby advertising profit (which is perfectly fine to me. It's what they do).
On the face of it, Limbaugh is just a radio talk show host, one of many on Clear Channel. Beck has a Fox show, as does Hannity, but Limbaugh? He just happens to have an enormous following on his show, which is why he gets his face on Newsweek; I don't think the relationship functions the other way around - far left bloggers and talk shows don't get the same audience as far right bloggers and talk shows.
So to say "the far left doesn't get heard on the MSM" is not sufficient. It's not a cause, it's a result - the cause is that there are far fewer far leftists in the US than far rightists, which causes both "only far rightists on the MSM" and "only far rightist violence observed".
The concept of prior restraints is fairly well developed in the U.S. You can't be stopped from saying something, but you can still be culpable if you "say" something illegal.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The difference between "you can't say these" and "you can say these, but I'll arrest you after the fact"
seems negligible.
as far as I am aware, the only thing that is illegal in of itself is threatening the president.
threatening someone else requires you to have some kind of motive and ability to carry out that threat i believe.
anything else is usually a civil issue and as such not really 'illegal' but is punishable.
It depends. In some cases, perhaps, but in other cases, you can at least martyr yourself to get information out, which is better than being arrested without having any message sent.
The only thing that's illegal is promoting 'imminent lawlessness' ala advocating a riot or similar.
None of what you just described constitutes censorship.
If we're going to say that the "rhetoric" of right-wingers is causing this, then could we not also say that the "rhetoric" of certain politicians (Murtha, Durbin, and others of their ilk) also incited violence against our troops? Where does it stop?
As for there not being any people on the left that commit such acts, what about Ayers? The Unabomber? Should we paint all left-wingers by these examples? I think not.
As for the issue of the statement mentioning Jesus Christ, remember that this was a churchgoing family. They were ostensibly Christian, and as such, would be comforted by such words. Non-Christians do tend to take those words differently, but the statement was not addressing non-Christians. And I'm not even going to question whether the man was Christian or not. It is not my place to judge, and all Christians sin. For all I know, I'll see Tiller in Heaven. That's not to say he won't answer for what he has done, but I believe we all will.
And you apparently haven't been paying attention to what these media figures are saying. They aren't just saying "Liberals are wrong" or even "Liberals are morally wrong" or "I disagree with liberals". They are saying "These people are murderers who need to be stopped" on national TV. Glenn Beck talks up revolution on his TV show and pretends to pour gasoline on people. It's not just being strongly against a political position, it's truly inappropriate, irresponsible and extremely suggestive to highly dangerous groups.
EDIT: Also, nobody's painting everybody with right-of-center sensibilities as inciting violence. But when a national "news" program calls people by name a killer and says they have "blood on their hands" and needs to be stopped, I don't think that given media personality gets to pretend their hands are clean when the person in question gets murdered.
Could you link to a few examples of prominent people on the Left which are comparable?
What violence against our troops?
Alternatively one could view it less that the MSM has an agenda and more that the right in general (and by extension, the far right) are much more skilled at utilizing traditional media to get their opinions aired in the MSM. Hence why it appears that far right rhetoric is all over whereas the far left isn't seen.
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The point is that freedom of speech is protected, and as such unless someone is directly inciting violence against an individual, they are protected. In the case of O'Reilly, it is his belief that Tiller had blood on his hands. That's predicated on where you stand on the abortion issue. And let's face it, if you're against abortion, you're going to think that the man is a despicable murderer that has killed thousands of innocent lives. But justice is not in our hands, and the person that committed this should either be imprisoned for life or executed. The fact that this was committed in the church makes this even more heinous to me.
I think that pretending this kind of stuff doesn't happen on both sides is intellectually dishonest.
Also, nobody has tried to claim that O'Reilly's incendiary rhetoric is illegal or unconstitutional. We are saying that it is dangerously irresponsible. In the case at hand, O'Reilly had in fact singled out a private citizen and called him a murderer on TV. The man in question was not a convicted murderer. Pundits who irresponsibly use such rhetoric while pretending that they honestly had no idea that there were crazy people out there who might snap and act on what's been suggested to them repeatedly are full of it.
Finally, this simply isn't happening on both sides, at least not at the moment. If there were some group analogous to the radical sixties groups and left-wing pundits were saying that Baptists or CEOs were coming to destroy them, then yes, absolutely those pundits would be just as guilty and just as morally culpable if radical groups started murdering Baptists or CEOs.
Links? I'm well aware of some of the horrible crap from Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, Coulter, Beck, &c. but I haven't really seen much that is actually comparable from any of those listed with the exception of Sykes bit at the Correspondents dinner.
This is the second time I've been baselessly accused of trying to abrogate someone's freedom of speech. Do people seriously not understand what constitutes actual censorship?
Again, the issue is not whether or not there are assholes on both sides. It's a question of what level of significance and influence do those assholes have in both the public sphere and a national political party? Rush Limbaugh is the de facto leader of the Republican Party at the moment. That doesn't really compare to some random dude on myspace in a Che Guevara t-shirt that compared Bush to Hitler.
A heavily left leaning online discussion forum attached to a video game website isn't really my outlet for voicing political opposition. It's my outlet for thinking out loud.
And my "moderate stance" is to try to understand other people by seeing where my experience touches their's and where their experience touches mine. It made me a supporter of full gay marriage before it was legal anywhere in this country.
Which is to say, I have an approach and sometimes it makes me radical and other times moderate.
that sounds like something you could sue over....
Not really. Perhaps a slander suit would have been possible, but O'Rly &c. most likely know where the line is and just how close to crossing it they can get away with.
I might ask much the same. Where are the people you mention calling for the deaths of these people, or inciting "hatred"?
There are people that are trying to paint vociferous opposition to what Tiller was doing as inciting someone to murder, and therefore that speech could be censored. I did not say you were calling for it. However, classifying speech of this type as "hate" speech would lead to censorship.
Do you even listen to Rush Limbaugh? I reject the very premise that what he says constitutes hate speech, or is inciting violence. Who determines what is or is not hate speech?
There is an argument to be made that people without a megaphone shouldn't say irresponsible things either (or throw stones at glass houses), but that seems given.
The Right
The Left
I didn't include political candidates or elected officials, not sure if they fit into the OP's media criteria.
edit:
added savage, maddow, scarborough, ingraham
removed maher (libertarian)
The examples of right-wing terrorism, however, include a bunch of people targeting abortion doctors, as well as Timothy McVeigh, who specifically targeted the U.S. government. And I know I've never heard anyone on the right talk about how evil the U.S. government or abortion are, right?