News and analysis continues to swell following the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords on Saturday. Broadly: Giffords remains in critical condition as the press speculates on the degree of her potential recovery; her alleged shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, appeared in federal court yesterday, facing five federal counts, and accepted prominent capital-defense counsel Judy Clarke as his lawyer; and, while the debate about Loughner’s affiliations, heated political rhetoric, and its connection to Saturday’s events continues, questions about gun control and mental health are beginning to stir more loudly than they did in the immediate aftermath.

Today, the right is coming back at the left for politicizing the Arizona shooting—several pundits, like Michelle Malkin, pointing to the left’s own use of violent political rhetoric over the past decade and crying, ‘Hypocrite!” Her post presents an interesting list of such instances, though most of Malkin’s examples are celebrities or extreme left fringe figures or protesters, not major political figures like those on the right singled out by the press for violent rhetoric in the past few days.

Rush Limbaugh is arguing—with typically little to back it up other than his own superhuman abilities to sniff out a leftist MSM conspiracy theory—that “The list is never ending of incidents like this where the media is damn certain, damn well certain they can give Obama his OKC bombing. They can give a Democrat president some kind of massive murder or disaster caused by conservatives. That remains the number one effort.”

There is a kind of hypocrisy here, too. Limbaugh, Malkin, and the like are clearly politicizing their argument about the politicization of a tragedy, firing back at what they perceive to be the left’s demonization of them and their words, by demonizing their attackers—how dare you pin this on us, you political opportunist! It is, as expected, a dogfight heading nowhere, and will no doubt continue to rush to that end.

More on-point is David Brooks in The New York Times today. While I think it’s folly for Brooks not to at least mention the series of events that tempted journalists to initially link the shooting to recent rhetoric—the office attack, the crosshairs graphic, threats against Giffords and other health care supporters—he makes important points which echo those we made yesterday and Sunday.

These accusations—that political actors contributed to the murder of 6 people, including a 9-year-old girl—are extremely grave. They were made despite the fact that there was, and is, no evidence that Loughner was part of these movements or a consumer of their literature. They were made despite the fact that the link between political rhetoric and actual violence is extremely murky. They were vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness.

Yet such is the state of things. We have a news media that is psychologically ill informed but politically inflamed, so it naturally leans toward political explanations. We have a news media with a strong distaste for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement, and this seemed like a golden opportunity to tarnish them. We have a segmented news media, so there is nobody in most newsrooms to stand apart from the prevailing assumptions. We have a news media market in which the rewards go to anybody who can stroke the audience’s pleasure buttons.

I have no love for Sarah Palin, and I like to think I’m committed to civil discourse. But the political opportunism occasioned by this tragedy has ranged from the completely irrelevant to the shamelessly irresponsible.

That spectrum feels about right—on both sides.

TAGS: , , , , ,

Joel Meares is a former CJR assistant editor.