Media shifts on violent rhetoric for Black Lives Matter (DP: I couldn't change spacing)

Media shifts on violent rhetoric for Black Lives Matter

By T. BECKET ADAMS (@BECKETADAMS) 

Some newsrooms are pushing back hard on the notion that the recent spike in police officer deaths is tied somehow to the anti-cop rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.

That's a sharp contrast from the press' more recent habit of tying Tea Party rhetoric to similarly deadly acts.

The Black Lives Matters movement, which was born out of concerns over police brutality in African-American communities, has come under fire recently for some of its members' charged rhetoric.

"Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon!" a group of activists chanted at a recent protest in New York City.

This and similar rhetoric comes even as police departments around the country mourn the deaths of six law enforcement agents who were shot and killed in the line of duty in August.

For many in the press, the cop killings are tragic. But it's also reckless and unfair to suggest that these murders have anything to do with the Black Lives Matters movement.

The Huffington Post reported that, "The argument that the Black Lives Matter movement is driving individuals to kill cops is ridiculous."

The so-called "explainer" website Vox.com added in a headline of its own, "There's nothing linking Black Lives Matter to a Texas cop's death."

"[S]tatistics about violence against cops have been used to tar a large group of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters as accessories to murder," ThinkProgress said. "This is part of a larger issue with blaming large groups of people of color for the actions of individuals."

Writing for the New York Times, columnist Charles M. Blow said, "There seems to be a concerted effort to defame and damage Black Lives Matter, and one has to wonder why."

"It is impossible to credibly make the case that Black Lives Matter as a movement is a hate group or that it advocates violence. Demanding police fairness, oversight and accountability isn't the same as promoting police hatred or harm," he added.

With the exception of specific Fox News personalities, most of the press agrees on this point: Black Lives Matter rhetoric is not to blame for the recent cop deaths. To suggest otherwise is unfair.

Though this caution is commendable, it's worth noting that this same courtesy has rarely — if ever — been shown to conservatives.

Since the Tea Party's informal launch in 2009 with an anti-bailout speech by CNBC's Rick Santelli, the press has blamed the right-wing movement for a number of vicious murders in which it played no role.

For example, on Jan. 8, 2011, when Jared Loughner opened fire on a crowd in Tucson, Ariz., killing six people and injuring 13, including former Rep. Gabby Giffords, some in the press jumped to blame conservative rhetoric.

"Arizona massacre: Should Sarah Palin share the blame?" read one Nation headline. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank blamed former Alaska gov. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck for the shooting.

"Both are finally being held to account for recklessly playing with violent images in a way that is bound to incite the unstable," said Milbank during an appearance on CNN's "Reliable Sources."

Within hours of the shooting tragedy, the New York Times' Paul Krugman had already published a blog post blaming conservatives.

"Just yesterday, Ezra Klein remarked that opposition to health reform was getting scary. Actually, it's been scary for quite a while, in a way that already reminded many of us of the climate that preceded the Oklahoma City bombing," he wrote. "You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we're going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it's long past time for the GOP's leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers."

He added, "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was."

President Obama even pleaded during a memorial service for the Tucson victims for Americans to clean up their rhetoric.

As it turned out, Loughner was apolitical. Prior to the shooting, he didn't watch cable news, and he didn't listen to talk radio.

Another example: Eco-terrorist James Lee, 43, was shot and killed by police on Sept. 1, 2010, after taking three people hostage at the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.

ThinkProgress rushed to insinuate that Lee was a likely conservative. The left-leaning website initially labeled the gunman a "climate-change denier," a moniker they usually bestow on Republican lawmakers.

As it turns out, Lee was actually just a violent environmentalist who feared that humans were destroying the Earth. ThinkProgress later updated its article to remove the "denier" tag.

Also in 2010, when software consultant Andrew Joseph Stack flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and IRS manager Vernon Hunter and injuring 13 more, some in the press rushed to suggest that the Tea Party was linked.

"There's no information yet on whether he was involved in any anti-government groups or whether he was a lone wolf. But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we're hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement," Jonathan Capehart wrote for the Washington Post.

Chris Rovzar wrote for New York Magazine, "He was mad at the IRS, and left what CNN reports was a suicide note on a local website, detailing his trials with the agency. In fact, a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a Tea Party rally."

Police later determined that Stack, whose suicide manifesto brimmed with effusive praise for communism, was mentally unstable.

There are more examples, including when the Nation's Robert Dreyfuss wrote in 2010 that the failed New York Times Square bomber was likely a member of "some squirrely branch of the Tea Party," and in 2012 when ABC News' Brian Ross suggested the same of James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., theater shooter.

Black Lives Matters protests continue nationwide, with its many members maintaining that they are not a violent "hate group," as at least one Fox News host has suggested.

"I mean It's an example of — even with this case down in Houston, when people of color, black people are accused of killing a police officer, you don't see that man down there getting bail," one organizer, Rashad Turner, explained recently on CNN.

"But what we see on the flip side of that is when a police officer kills an unarmed black male, that the system still works in their favor that they are able to get bail. So when we say fry them, we're not speaking of killing a police officer … we're saying, treat the police the same as you're going to treat a civilian who commits murder against a police officer," he added.

He continued, noting the difference between how people react to when a police officer is killed and when an African-American is killed.

"The uproar over this rhetoric does not match the uproar that we see when a black person is killed every 28 hours by police," he said. "I mean in Saint Paul, Minnesota we have the deadliest police department in our state. Why do we want to get hung up on rhetoric rather than addressing the facts? We need police reform. Otherwise the climate in this country is going to continue to be an us versus them climate. And that helps no one. We all suffer."

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/media-shifts-on-violent-rhetoric-for-black-lives-matter/article/2571437