Is Hysterical Right-Wing Media Pushing the Unhinged Over the Edge?

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet. Posted April 11, 2009.

Confronted with a wildly popular president prone to few gaffes, conservative media are having trouble coming up with ways to successfully smear Barack Obama's administration.

So, they have resorted to propagating insane conspiracy theories. Fox News is giving airtime to 9/11-truther Alex Jones, while Fox anchor Glenn Beck has spouted off about a "new world order” and mused about the existence of "FEMA-managed concentration camps."

The conservative media's embrace of paranoid right-wing ideas should serve as a mildly entertaining gauge of the movement's implosion. Except, Max Blumenthal points out in an article recently published on AlterNet, the legitimization of the uber-fringe may further unhinge mentally deranged individuals and spur them to act out their paranoid fantasies.

Blumenthal points out that Richard Poplawski, the 22-year-old Pittsburgh man who allegedly killed three police officers, was an avid Jones fan and was reportedly petrified that the government would take away his guns.

Blumenthal quotes David Neiwert, a veteran reporter on right-wing militia movements, who says: "It's always been a problem when major-league demagogues start promulgating false information for political gain. ... What it does is unhinge fringe players from reality and dislodges them even further. When someone like Poplawski hears Glenn Beck touting 'One World Government' and 'they're gonna take your gun' theories, they believe then that it must be true. And that's when they really become crazy.

AlterNet's readers had a lot to say about the dangerous new turn taken by Fox News and other right-wing media.

Aimleft writes:

It is a thin line between talking about censoring ideas (which I'm not trying to do) and figuring out if expressing those ideas, continually and in a constantly outraged manner, is an actual incitement to violence, and not necessarily only for those who are already "crazy." Know what I'm saying? I'm not sure we should put limits on the expression of thought, but then again, there are reasons why it's wrong (and illegal?) to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. The article isn't saying the right wing BS caused this incident. It's just asking if their rhetoric fueled the rage. I'm in total agreement that it did, with this guy, and will continue to do so with others. You can't listen to that shit over and over again without getting all riled up.

zola77 agrees, writing that media are a powerful force:

It would be hard to make a case that conservative media had no impact on these actions.

Media (of all political persuasions) tend to amp up the paranoia factor in their audiences to draw a crowd. The difference is that conservatives are naturally more prone to fear and are therefore already in a more paranoid mind-set.

Scientific studies suggest that people who identify as politically conservative are by nature/genetically more prone to fear and paranoia. If someone is naturally in such a frame of mind, and then an external source amplifies that -- there is inevitably going to be a breaking point.

snax writes that in general, the conservative mind frame is more susceptible to conspiracy theories:

It's not whether somebody is a "nut" or not, but rather their propensity to regard others as inherently bad and needing to be controlled versus inherently good and needing freedom to grow.

See more stories tagged with: media, fox, glenn beck, conspiracy theory, poplawski, alex jones

Tana Ganeva is an assistant editor at AlterNet.

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