Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Townhall.com that the media has to realize that giving a huge amount of attention about possible violence against themselves makes that violence more likely. Mass public shooters do their attacks to get media attention, and the media is making it clear that violence against the media seemingly guarantees a level of coverage that can’t be attained by an attack at a mall, movie theater, or even school.
Talking about Trump, MSNBC’s Katy Tur said last Friday: “Yeah, we get it, you don’t like us. Fine. But do you have to put our lives in danger?”
Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” argued last Wednesday that by getting the crowd at one of his rallies riled up against CNN, Trump was engendering possible violence. Todd reminded viewers of an incident last year when a white supremacist used his car to run over a protester in Charlottesville, Virginia. On Sunday morning’s show, Todd claimed that Trump made violence against the press “easier to rationalize.”
The New York Times’s Bret Stephens even wrote a piece over the weekend titled: “Trump will have Blood on His Hands.”
“I warned that this inflammatory language [by Trump] is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence,” said New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. CNN’s Jim Acosta echoed that warning: “I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in the conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt.”
After the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, Maryland in June, press members and Democrat campaign officials were quick to blame it on Trump’s bashing of “fake news,” which he called the “enemy of the people.” Apologies weren’t forthcoming after police declared the shooting a “targeted attack.” The killer had a long, troubled relationship with the paper, which he had sued for defamation over a July 2011 column.
Mass public shooters may begin to realize that shooting up a liberal media outlet would create a publicity firestorm. These shooters crave attention and pick targets where they can cause maximum casualties and gain maximum notoriety. Let’s hope that people don’t get to thinking that killing people in the media is a special ticket to notoriety.
Of course, this is no different than the impact that the media has on these attacks by continually mentioning these killer’s names.
Reporters decried the Capitol Gazette shooting as “one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in US history” and said it “may be the worst mass shooting of journalists in the country.” While understandable from the media’s perspective, giving so much excited coverage creates an incentive for someone else to come along and try to cause an even bigger sensation.
Compare for a moment the news coverage given to the Republican congressmen who were shot at last summer or the threats of violence against the daughters of Congressmen Jason Lewis (R-MN) or Lee Zeldin (R-NY) with the coverage that the media gives to vague threats of violence against them. In Lewis’s case, the threats against his daughters came immediately after completely dishonest attacks by CNN and others in the media that he was disappointed that he could no longer call women “sluts.”
If you were a killer who craved attention, who would you attack? A Republican congressman or someone in the media?
The inevitable “I told you so” comments that we would hear if violence actually occurred against the media seemingly guarantees a level of coverage that can’t be attained by an attack at a mall, movie theater, or even school. . .
.The rest of the piece is available here.
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