Yesterday, following the news that a Republican congressmen was shot playing baseball, along with four others, in Virginia, the New York Times wrote what one conservative website is calling the “Worst Editorial In Human History.” Discussion of it has dominated social media, and even a number of notable liberal pundits are appalled. What has people so agitated? Here’s what they published:
The Times has since issued a blunt correction: “An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.” Just to recap, Sarah Palin and Tea Partiers were blamed widely for incitement in the media in the immediate aftermath of the Giffords shooting (quite notably in the pages of the Times), even though it was apparent on the day of the shooting that Jared Lee Loughner was paranoid schizophrenic who believed that grammar was a conspiracy to keep people from thinking correct thoughts, a man with no rational political beliefs.
Further, there’s absolutely no evidence that he ever saw the map circulated by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, and the idea that using cross hairs on a map to rhetorically “target” politicians for defeat counts as an incitement to violence is absurd. Politics, like everything else, is full of martial metaphors—”campaign” is a term borrowed from war.
Despite this, two years after the Giffords shooting and long after we knew all about Loughner’s motivations (or lack thereof), a news story in the Times noted that “many criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords who she said should be defeated for re-election,” without noting there’s no link between Loughner and Palin.
The Times edit was also factually challenged in other significant ways. It’s unfair to speculate too much about what motivated yesterday’s shooting, but Hodgkinson’s Facebook page was littered with liberal politics and attacks on Trump and the GOP. Unlike Loughner, he wrote letters to the editor of his local paper that somewhat angrily, but quite cogently, espoused progressive sentiment. And his own family says he was distraught over the election of Trump. The Times has it exactly backward. The link between rhetoric and incitement appears to be far clearer with regard to Hodgkinson than Loughner.
Notably, the Times‘s own editorial when the Giffords shooting occurred in 2011 was at least clear that it was unfair to blame Loughner for being directly incited by Republicans. Or at least they said as much before they tried to blame Republicans for creating an atmosphere of violence that may have inspired him indirectly:
By the precedent set in 2011 by the Times editorial page itself, the editorial they produced last night was “facile and mistaken.” While the Times has taken the initial step of acknowledging factual reality, it’s unclear if the Times grasps how deep these institutional problems are. The Times didn’t just botch a fact here, the editorial was largely premised on, once again, wrongly accusing right-wing rhetoric of inciting violence by way of looking to excuse an instance where left-wing violence could said to be a matter of incitement, regardless of significant evidence suggesting otherwise.
The fact that this was done when the contradiction was so obvious prompts discomfiting questions about why they didn’t uphold basic standards of veracity and decency. It does not help that the editorial page also has quite the history of finding creative ways to blame Republicans for violent attacks, that by any reasonable standard, they had nothing to do with. Just to cite one of the multiple examples, last year, when ISIS terrorist Omar Mateen shot up a gay nightclub in Florida, the Times opined, “Hate crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. … Tragically, this is the state of American politics, driven too often by Republican politicians.”
And like it or not, the editorial page is perceived as an institutional voice, which will taint the news side of the paper—and I’m sure many Times reporters, liberal though they may be, are frustrated by such an obtuse and untrue editorial. (Conservatives also complained that the Times‘s actual news reporting on the shooting conviently furthered the left-leaning narratives, albeit much less egregiously.)
These are tense times in no small part because trust in the media as an institution is at rock bottom. The Times and other media institutions are understandably alarmed by the growing chorus of voices on the right that view the media as the enemy. But without a more thorough apology and meaningful efforts to be truthful and fair in the future, it’s hard to see how the Times editorial won’t make our civic discussions significantly more toxic than they already are.
