America: Vanquished by vitriol
By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and David Gelles
Published: January 11 2011 23:14
People tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American people by people who make a living off doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.
The words of Clarence Dupnik, sheriff of Pima County, after the weekend slaughter outside an Arizona supermarket echoed language used last year by Gabrielle Giffords, the local congresswoman whose Democratic seat was one of 20 put in the crosshairs of a gun by Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential candidate.“When people do that, they’ve got to realise there are consequences to that action,”
Ms Giffords had said. On Saturday, she was one of 14 wounded in a rampage that left six dead.
After past murderous shooting sprees, US news media have been quick to speculate that violent video games, Hollywood films or heavy metal music may have tipped the suspected perpetrators over the edge. In recent days, as commentators struggled to make sense of the shooting in Tucson, many instead turned their lenses on themselves. The viciously partisan tone of much modern political coverage had set the stage for such violence, several argued.
There is no evidence that Jared Lee Loughner, aged 22, who is charged with the attack, might have been inspired by anything he heard on radio or television. “Most 22-year-olds don’t listen to talk radio,” notes Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, which tracks the industry. Nonetheless, the shooting has prompted a public bout of introspection by usually self-assured media personalities. If a nation’s response to tragedy reveals something about its anxieties, it is clear that the US was growing deeply uncomfortable with the media’s highly charged rhetoric.
Before Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election victory, partisan voices on cable television, talk radio and online had already been enjoying growing audiences and heightened growing passions, even as network news audiences aged and shrunk and newspapers lost advertisers and readers. But since the election of America’s first black president, clashing personalities on left and right alike have been accused of seizing on rhetoric from politicians and stoking the debate with their own vitriol.
On the right, commentators have equated healthcare reform with socialism, questioned the president’s citizenship and dubbed him anti-American. Glenn Beck, a conservative media star with a Fox News show, radio programme and two websites, joked about driving “a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers” in the Democratic party. Along with Mr Beck on the right are Bill O’Reilly, another Fox News host, as well as radio personality Rush Limbaugh and Ms Palin, who left public office for social media and a platform on Fox.
On the left, Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC host who often names Fox rivals in the “Worst Person in the World” segment of his cable show, has called Scott Brown, the Tea Party-backed Massachusetts senator, a racist and homophobe and has urged the president to prosecute officials from the administration of George W. Bush for torture, “starting at the top”. Joining Mr Obermann on the left are Rachel Maddow, another MSNBC host, along with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington.
“When you flood the zone with language that suggests your opponents are not just wrong-headed but illegitimate and anti-American ... this is dangerous and it provides a climate where a fringe group of extremists and mentally ill people are going to be encouraged to do something,” says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
But several other conservative commentators cite what Talkers’ Mr Harrison calls “political opportunism on the part of the left”, with Mr Beck and Mr Limbaugh claiming that liberals want to use the bloodshed to silence conservatives. “What this is all about is shutting down conservative media,” Mr Limbaugh told his audience, predicting that draft legislation to stifle conservative speech was “sitting in a desk drawer somewhere just waiting for the right event”.
Mr O’Reilly started his Monday evening show with a fiery attack on “far-left thugs” who he said were exploiting tragedy for political gain. He accused MSNBC of spewing hatred and attacked Mr Krugman, who had blamed Fox in a column about the shootings, as a “radical left Princeton professor”. Mr O’Reilly and Mr Beck have said they feared for their own safety in the tense climate, with Mr Beck urging Ms Palin to employ the same security company as he does, after news outlets criticised her targeting of Ms Giffords on a website map. “An attempt on you could bring the republic down,” he warned the former Alaska governor.
Opponents have been seizing on such language to claim that conservative media figures are stoking a climate of fear, and some commentators say they will try to be more moderate. Mr Olbermann pledged to “put the gun metaphors away”. Mr O’Reilly agreed that “there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed”.
. . .
Concern that apocalyptic rhetoric once confined to society’s fringes is finding a mainstream audience has been building for years. Direct evidence of vitriol leading to violence is scarce, but threats against politicians are up. “The partisan media helped pull the trigger in Tucson,” Alan Mutter, a media critic, wrote on his blog.
At its extreme, the media have given a platform to “hateful and racist people” who may incite violence, says Carolyn Brown, assistant professor at American University’s school of communication and a former producer for both MSNBC and Fox News. “The rhetoric has been bad for a very long time, but since Obama has been in office it has been ramped up.”
Chris Ruddy, publisher of Newsmax, a conservative magazine and website, says Mr Bush was subject to “extreme vitriol” and talk of impeachment over the Iraq war – but blames his successor as the cause of the current hostile coverage: “I think that Obama’s changes are so radical for what the country is used to, it sets up a reaction that’s equal and opposite.”
Vicious media divisions predate the American Revolution and peaked again in the battles between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the cultural battles of the 1960s. What has changed, says Mr Ornstein, is that extreme voices are not reined in: “We have virtually lost the concept of shame.”
But Martin Medhurst, professor of political science at Baylor University in Texas, says vitriol has risen since the mid-1990s because of economic uncertainty. “In dire economic times, rhetoric parallels the perceived crisis. Extremism of all types always preys on fears,” he says.
Russell Simmons, the hip-hop pioneer behind Def Jam who helps run the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, reaches for the same explanation. The media must take some responsibility but “poverty is fertile ground for hate”, he says: “This year there’s more hate, antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Mr Simmons landed a scoop this week with an interview with Roger Ailes in which the Fox News chairman said the debate was “just a bullshit way to use the death of a little girl [Christina Taylor Green, nine-year-old victim of the shootings] to get Fox News in an argument”.
But Mr Ailes, who made headlines last year for likening National Public Radio bosses to Nazis, told Mr Simmons he had instructed his team to “shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually”.
According to Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism, the vituperative tone is not always set by executives or editors. “We’re really talking about media personalities on radio and cable who function to some extent as independent agents. People aren’t dictating to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck,” he says, so the weekend’s events seem unlikely to prompt a sudden outbreak of moderation. “The tabloid era of the 1920s in our press was dampened down by the Great Depression, not by newsrooms suddenly sending out memos.”
Moreover, the lines between cable news outlets and political parties have blurred.
Fox News employs five potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012, and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, donated more than $1m to the Republican Governors Association last year. Mr Olbermann was recently suspended for making donations to three Democratic candidates, including Ms Giffords.
Audiences have chosen their corners. Almost three times as many Republicans as Democrats watch Fox, according to the Pew Research Centre, and MSNBC’s (smaller) audience is a mirror image. Younger viewers largely shun traditional TV news in favour of satirists led by Jon Stewart.
“If there weren’t an audience for this kind of polarised rhetoric on cable, it wouldn’t air,” says Mr Rosenstiel. “But it is also true that the most popular cable news host, Bill O’Reilly, has less than half the audience than the least popular network news host, Katie Couric.”
. . .
With a relatively small cable news audience, “what I can’t figure out is why the rest of the news and politicians spend so much time talking about it”, says Kelly McBride, leader of the Poynter Institute’s media ethics group. That fascination has magnified the prominence of polemical hosts. Organisations targeting a political demographic “have had to brand themselves as more extreme in order to find their niche”, she argues.
Barring an economic revival, academics doubt the tone will change for long. “I don’t think the news media will change, because it’s all about ratings,” Ms Brown says. Attacks on Mr Beck or Ms Palin will only solidify their support, Mr Ruddy predicts.
On Monday evening, as the nation tried to come to terms with what had happened in Arizona, one of the most sober assessments came from Mr Stewart. The Daily Show host, who often paints the news media as a failing immune system for US society, chose not to attack them this time.
“I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric [for Tucson] any more than I would blame heavy metal music for [the 1999 shootings in] Columbine,” he said. “Boy, would it be nice to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible, because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stop this, the horrors will end. But ... you cannot outsmart crazy. Crazy always seems to find a way; it always has.”
 |
| Opinions to air: Glenn Beck in a New York studio. The rightwing commentator once joked about driving ‘a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers’ in the Democratic party |
The words of Clarence Dupnik, sheriff of Pima County, after the weekend slaughter outside an Arizona supermarket echoed language used last year by Gabrielle Giffords, the local congresswoman whose Democratic seat was one of 20 put in the crosshairs of a gun by Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential candidate.“When people do that, they’ve got to realise there are consequences to that action,”
Ms Giffords had said. On Saturday, she was one of 14 wounded in a rampage that left six dead.
After past murderous shooting sprees, US news media have been quick to speculate that violent video games, Hollywood films or heavy metal music may have tipped the suspected perpetrators over the edge. In recent days, as commentators struggled to make sense of the shooting in Tucson, many instead turned their lenses on themselves. The viciously partisan tone of much modern political coverage had set the stage for such violence, several argued.
There is no evidence that Jared Lee Loughner, aged 22, who is charged with the attack, might have been inspired by anything he heard on radio or television. “Most 22-year-olds don’t listen to talk radio,” notes Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers magazine, which tracks the industry. Nonetheless, the shooting has prompted a public bout of introspection by usually self-assured media personalities. If a nation’s response to tragedy reveals something about its anxieties, it is clear that the US was growing deeply uncomfortable with the media’s highly charged rhetoric.
‘Commonsense Conservatives and lovers of America don’t retreat, instead – RELOAD
Sarah Palin
The television sports reporter turned governor of Alaska became an overnight media star when picked by John McCain as presidential running-mate in 2008, but made the “lamestream” and liberal media a punchbag.
Has a Fox News contract, a reality TV show, 2.6m Facebook fans and 370,000 Twitter followers. Staff at the weekend took down an online map showing crosshairs on Gabrielle Giffords’ congressional district.
Before Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election victory, partisan voices on cable television, talk radio and online had already been enjoying growing audiences and heightened growing passions, even as network news audiences aged and shrunk and newspapers lost advertisers and readers. But since the election of America’s first black president, clashing personalities on left and right alike have been accused of seizing on rhetoric from politicians and stoking the debate with their own vitriol.
On the right, commentators have equated healthcare reform with socialism, questioned the president’s citizenship and dubbed him anti-American. Glenn Beck, a conservative media star with a Fox News show, radio programme and two websites, joked about driving “a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers” in the Democratic party. Along with Mr Beck on the right are Bill O’Reilly, another Fox News host, as well as radio personality Rush Limbaugh and Ms Palin, who left public office for social media and a platform on Fox.
On the left, Keith Olbermann, the MSNBC host who often names Fox rivals in the “Worst Person in the World” segment of his cable show, has called Scott Brown, the Tea Party-backed Massachusetts senator, a racist and homophobe and has urged the president to prosecute officials from the administration of George W. Bush for torture, “starting at the top”. Joining Mr Obermann on the left are Rachel Maddow, another MSNBC host, along with New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington.
‘The 24-hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator didn’t cause our problems but makes solving them harder’
Jon Stewart
Host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show has blurred lines between news and stand-up. Responded to Glenn Beck’s rally with his “Rally to restore sanity and/or fear” with fellow fake news host Stephen Colbert, then won compensation for “first responders” to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. His blend of news clips, interviews and parody earned him the tag in a 2009 poll of most trusted US newscaster since Walter Cronkite.
“When you flood the zone with language that suggests your opponents are not just wrong-headed but illegitimate and anti-American ... this is dangerous and it provides a climate where a fringe group of extremists and mentally ill people are going to be encouraged to do something,” says Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the rightwing American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
But several other conservative commentators cite what Talkers’ Mr Harrison calls “political opportunism on the part of the left”, with Mr Beck and Mr Limbaugh claiming that liberals want to use the bloodshed to silence conservatives. “What this is all about is shutting down conservative media,” Mr Limbaugh told his audience, predicting that draft legislation to stifle conservative speech was “sitting in a desk drawer somewhere just waiting for the right event”.
Mr O’Reilly started his Monday evening show with a fiery attack on “far-left thugs” who he said were exploiting tragedy for political gain. He accused MSNBC of spewing hatred and attacked Mr Krugman, who had blamed Fox in a column about the shootings, as a “radical left Princeton professor”. Mr O’Reilly and Mr Beck have said they feared for their own safety in the tense climate, with Mr Beck urging Ms Palin to employ the same security company as he does, after news outlets criticised her targeting of Ms Giffords on a website map. “An attempt on you could bring the republic down,” he warned the former Alaska governor.
(Asked what his hopes were for the Barack Obama presidency): ‘I hope he fails’
Rush Limbaugh
The dean of conservative radio hosts. Syndicated shows draw an unrivalled 15m weekly fans – or “ditto heads” as he calls them. “Rushbo” has long railed against liberal bias in the “drive-by media” and lambasts Barack Obama as the “Supreme Leader”. Forbes estimates he made $58.5m last year, mostly from a $400m 10-year radio contract, topped up from an online business that charges for some content.
Opponents have been seizing on such language to claim that conservative media figures are stoking a climate of fear, and some commentators say they will try to be more moderate. Mr Olbermann pledged to “put the gun metaphors away”. Mr O’Reilly agreed that “there are lines that shouldn’t be crossed”.
. . .
Concern that apocalyptic rhetoric once confined to society’s fringes is finding a mainstream audience has been building for years. Direct evidence of vitriol leading to violence is scarce, but threats against politicians are up. “The partisan media helped pull the trigger in Tucson,” Alan Mutter, a media critic, wrote on his blog.
At its extreme, the media have given a platform to “hateful and racist people” who may incite violence, says Carolyn Brown, assistant professor at American University’s school of communication and a former producer for both MSNBC and Fox News. “The rhetoric has been bad for a very long time, but since Obama has been in office it has been ramped up.”
Chris Ruddy, publisher of Newsmax, a conservative magazine and website, says Mr Bush was subject to “extreme vitriol” and talk of impeachment over the Iraq war – but blames his successor as the cause of the current hostile coverage: “I think that Obama’s changes are so radical for what the country is used to, it sets up a reaction that’s equal and opposite.”
‘The conservative media are very partisan ... Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line’
Rachel Maddow
Keith Olbermann’s splenetic MSNBC performances lead into an hour-long news show hosted by a 37-year-old Stanford public policy graduate. Maddow, a former host of the liberal Air America radio network, is a rare female anchor in a media landscape dominated by older white men, and even rarer for being openly lesbian. By turns cheerful and accusatory, she has brought a younger audience to MSNBC with attacks on Tea Party “teabaggers”.
Vicious media divisions predate the American Revolution and peaked again in the battles between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the cultural battles of the 1960s. What has changed, says Mr Ornstein, is that extreme voices are not reined in: “We have virtually lost the concept of shame.”
But Martin Medhurst, professor of political science at Baylor University in Texas, says vitriol has risen since the mid-1990s because of economic uncertainty. “In dire economic times, rhetoric parallels the perceived crisis. Extremism of all types always preys on fears,” he says.
Russell Simmons, the hip-hop pioneer behind Def Jam who helps run the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, reaches for the same explanation. The media must take some responsibility but “poverty is fertile ground for hate”, he says: “This year there’s more hate, antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Mr Simmons landed a scoop this week with an interview with Roger Ailes in which the Fox News chairman said the debate was “just a bullshit way to use the death of a little girl [Christina Taylor Green, nine-year-old victim of the shootings] to get Fox News in an argument”.
Fox News ‘goes beyond having a point of view and actually starts to shill for partisan causes’
Keith OlbermanLong-time sportscaster who became host of MSNBC’s evening. The disclosure last year that he had donated to three Democrats’ campaigns resulted in a brief suspension.
But Mr Ailes, who made headlines last year for likening National Public Radio bosses to Nazis, told Mr Simmons he had instructed his team to “shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually”.
According to Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism, the vituperative tone is not always set by executives or editors. “We’re really talking about media personalities on radio and cable who function to some extent as independent agents. People aren’t dictating to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck,” he says, so the weekend’s events seem unlikely to prompt a sudden outbreak of moderation. “The tabloid era of the 1920s in our press was dampened down by the Great Depression, not by newsrooms suddenly sending out memos.”
Obama ‘has exposed himself as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people. This guy is I believe a racist’
Glenn Beck
Conservative rising star since Fox News hired him two years ago. Easily moved to tears and fond of sketching apparent links between progressive groups on a blackboard. His “rally to restore honour” in Washington last year moved into territory televangelists once occupied. A prolific multimedia machine, he has written six best-sellers and launched a news site called The Blaze. A New York station dropped his radio show this month for poor ratings.
Moreover, the lines between cable news outlets and political parties have blurred.
Fox News employs five potential Republican presidential candidates for 2012, and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, donated more than $1m to the Republican Governors Association last year. Mr Olbermann was recently suspended for making donations to three Democratic candidates, including Ms Giffords.
Audiences have chosen their corners. Almost three times as many Republicans as Democrats watch Fox, according to the Pew Research Centre, and MSNBC’s (smaller) audience is a mirror image. Younger viewers largely shun traditional TV news in favour of satirists led by Jon Stewart.
“If there weren’t an audience for this kind of polarised rhetoric on cable, it wouldn’t air,” says Mr Rosenstiel. “But it is also true that the most popular cable news host, Bill O’Reilly, has less than half the audience than the least popular network news host, Katie Couric.”
. . .
With a relatively small cable news audience, “what I can’t figure out is why the rest of the news and politicians spend so much time talking about it”, says Kelly McBride, leader of the Poynter Institute’s media ethics group. That fascination has magnified the prominence of polemical hosts. Organisations targeting a political demographic “have had to brand themselves as more extreme in order to find their niche”, she argues.
Partisan news makes good money, Ms McBride notes: “The people that are most guilty of this kind of rhetoric know exactly what they are doing.”
Barring an economic revival, academics doubt the tone will change for long. “I don’t think the news media will change, because it’s all about ratings,” Ms Brown says. Attacks on Mr Beck or Ms Palin will only solidify their support, Mr Ruddy predicts.
On Monday evening, as the nation tried to come to terms with what had happened in Arizona, one of the most sober assessments came from Mr Stewart. The Daily Show host, who often paints the news media as a failing immune system for US society, chose not to attack them this time.
“I wouldn’t blame our political rhetoric [for Tucson] any more than I would blame heavy metal music for [the 1999 shootings in] Columbine,” he said. “Boy, would it be nice to draw a straight line of causation from this horror to something tangible, because then we could convince ourselves that if we just stop this, the horrors will end. But ... you cannot outsmart crazy. Crazy always seems to find a way; it always has.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario