Right-Wing Violence Will Continue, And Fox News Will Have to Answer For It

By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America. Posted June 10, 2009.

Beck made that very claim on his radio show [emphasis added]:

BECK: Well, let me ask you this. I had to really search the news long and hard to find out about the two recruiters -- the two soldiers that had been killed by the Muslim convert, that were gunned down in Arkansas. I had to really look hard for that. Is anybody asking is Keith Olbermann responsible for the death of those two soldiers? Keith Olbermann has railed against recruiters. Keith Olbermann has railed against the baby killers that our U.S. soldiers are. He's railed against this war. MSNBC was right all over the story about how our troops are torturing and killing innocents. Has anybody asked if he's responsible?

Slight problem. Neither Beck nor anyone else on the right last week could find any hateful, violent anti-recruiter attacks launched by liberal media personalities. (Let alone baby-killing quotes.) Why can't they find the rhetoric? Because nobody on the left with any sort of national platform has targeted military recruiters in recent years. If they had, Malkin would have included the damning quotes in her column. (Either that, or she needs to hire a new researcher.)

Have there been, over the years, occasional efforts on the left to ban military recruiters from campuses and other environments? There certainly have. Can conservatives point to any kind of wholesale hate rhetoric or vigilante-style calls to action by mainstream liberal pundits and commentators designed to dehumanize and demonize military recruiters? Of course they cannot. (And sorry, Code Pink demonstrations don't qualify as mainstream media commentators.) Because if conservatives could have found those kinds of irresponsible attacks, they would have thrown them back in everyone's faces last week.

But apparently, they don't exist.

As far as I know, there are no gotcha, hateful, get-the-recruiter quotes to hang around the necks of Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow or anyone else on the left for the simple reason that high-profile media liberals haven't led dangerous crusades to target military recruiters the way O'Reilly led a dangerous crusade against Tiller. And the way Beck has against Obama.

As a rule, media liberals don't traffic in irresponsible, militia-style rhetoric. But agitators like O'Reilly and Beck do, and now conservatives can't make that fact go away.

That's why the Fox News crew and its eager apologists are going to have to come up with a better line of defense. Because as long as Fox News peddles its incendiary vigilante rhetoric, the right-wing violence in America will continue, and Fox News is going to have to answer for it.

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