Conservative media figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are raising fears that liberals could use the Tucson shootings as an excuse to clamp down on their voices, even as two prominent liberals made public statements urging that the FCC and Fox News do just tha
Limbaugh and Beck, along with other conservative voices like Sarah Palin and Bill O'Reilly, had come under fire in the hours after the shooting from liberals such as Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman, who accused them of using violent rhetoric that could push an unhinged person over the edge. But no link has been found between suspected shooter Jared Lee Loughner and any of these media figures, or Palin.
"I'm not playing politics," Beck said on his radio show Tuesday. He said he had "softened" his rhetoric over the last two years. "Nobody wants to recognize this. Why? Because it hurts their dialogue."
Limbaugh railed against the left's attempts to "massage" the shooting "for their political benefit," saying Democrats were just waiting for an excuse to "regulate out of business their political opponents."
"I wouldn't be surprised if somebody in the Obama administration or some FCC bureaucrat or some Democrat congressman has it already written up, such legislation, sitting in a desk drawer somewhere just waiting for the right event for a clampdown," Limbaugh said. " They have been trying this ever since the Oklahoma City bombing."
In fact, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the third-ranking Democrat in Congress and one of the more outspoken voices in the wake of the shooting, blamed vitriol in the public discourse for the events and told the Charleston Post and Courier on Monday he wants to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, a defunct policy requiring media to cover both sides of controversial issues that many in the industry expect would mean the death of conservative talk radio. (Both President Obama and Clyburn's daughter, Mignon Clyburn, an FCC commissioner, have said they do not support the policy.)
And David Brock, the CEO of the liberal watchdog Media Matters, wrote an open letter to Rupert Murdoch calling on him to fire or rein in Beck and Palin for their use of violent rhetoric on Fox News.
"Beck and Palin are two of Fox's most recognizable figures," Brock wrote. "Before this heartbreaking tragedy in Arizona, you were either unwilling or unable to rein in their violent rhetoric. But now, in the wake of the killings, your network must take a stand."
Fox News chief Roger Ailes took that stand in a way Monday, in an interview with Russell Simmons. While he argued that both sides of the aisle were responsible for the moment's overheated political tone, he agreed that both should work to dial it back.
"I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually," Ailes said. "You don't have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that."
Palin has come under the most criticism since Saturday, largely because she had once posted on her SarahPAC page a "target list" of lawmakers she wanted to see unseated, which included a crosshairs over Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district.
Ailes argued that Palin has just as often been the victim of this kind of imagery. "Listen, I have a picture of Sarah Palin hanging from the end of a rope," he said. "They made a doll up like her and hung her."
Beck riffed on this same theme on his show, pointing listeners to Michelle Malkin's roundup Monday of some of the ugliest propaganda that has been aimed at people like Palin and President George W. Bush.
"I would just ask for someone to show an inkling of leadership and denounce violence on all sides," he said.
He also served as a mediator for Palin, who has remained unusually silent since the shooting, save for a Facebook post expressing her condolences for Giffords, her family and the other victims.
He read aloud an email from her, saying, "I hate violence. I hate war. Our children will not have peace if politicos just capitalize on this to succeed in portraying anyone as inciting terror and violence."
Like Limbaugh, he hinted that his medium was in danger.
"Talk radio, they are trying to put it on the ropes again," he said.
On his Fox News show, Beck accused liberals and the media of dusting off an old narrative and applying it to the shooting without evidence.
"How do you control Sarah Palin? You don't. You just shut her down," he said. He accused liberals of trying to silence the opposition, saying, "They can do it with the Fairness Doctrine."
The Fairness Doctrine was introduced as FCC policy in 1949, and applies to all holders of broadcast licenses - i.e., not to cable or the Internet. President Ronald Reagan struck it down in 1989, but in recent years, various Democrats in Congress have expressed support for reinstating it. Conservatives argue that Democratic enthusiasm for bringing back the policy is merely a response to their distaste for conservative talk radio.
"The script has already been written," Beck said. "All they are waiting for is the perfect case. And every time these things happen, they roll this case out."
The last time a violent attack prompted a nationwide debate about political vitriol in the media was, of course, the Oklahoma City bombing, which President Clinton blamed in part on the climate created by conservative talk radio.
Limbaugh, as the largest talk radio figure of that time, found himself in the middle of that debate, and regards the current debate as more of the same.
The difference is that this time, conservative media is not the outlier that it once was.
"In continuing this template and narrative that the tea party, that Sarah Palin, that talk radio, that Fox News is inspiring violence, they forget that in the process of so doing, they are not attacking what is now a majority of America," he said. "They are accusing a majority of Americans of being accomplices to murder."
The Arizona Republic is a member of the Politico Network
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