It takes a special lack of self-awareness to repeat a baseless charge against a public figure, while also warning that fake news can have dangerous and potentially deadly consequences.
But that’s exactly what Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak did this week when she dredged up the false charge that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin inspired a mass shooting in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz.
Dvorak’s recitation of the unfounded claim came in an article titled “At a D.C. pizzeria, the dangers of fake news just got all too real.”
On Sunday, an armed 28-year-old man, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, N.C., marched into a D.C. pizzeria, pointed his rifle at restaurant employees and fired at least one round. Luckily, no one was hurt.
After Welch surrendered to the police, he reportedly told authorities he was “self-investigating” a conspiracy that the eatery quietly operated a child sex ring on the side. Bizarre theories alleging pizzerias act as fronts for some massive international child sex ring can be traced back to a thread that appeared first on the imageboard website 4Chan. The rumor was picked up later by the conspiracy theory website InfoWars.com, which then “reported” the story to a much larger audience.
Days after the incident, the Post’s Dvorak argued that fake news stories can have deadly consequences. In making this point, however, she also dusted off a false charge that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin helped inspire a mass shooting in 2011 in Tucson, Ariz.
Here is what Dvorak wrote:
Five years ago, it wasn’t fake news but an equally careless use of words that helped incite an equally terrible burst of violence.
Supporters of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin put out a map with crosshairs targeting the districts of 20 House Democrats and urging folks: “Don’t Retreat, Instead — RELOAD!”
Then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was on that map and criticized it as soon as it was posted online and her office was vandalized.
[…]
On Jan. 8, 2011, the consequences were chilling: Jared Loughner showed up with a gun outside a Tucson supermarket where Giffords was greeting constituents and killed six people and injured 20 more, including Giffords.
There is no proof of what Dvorak asserts, that the Tucson shooting was the “consequence” of the crosshair map. There’s no evidence Loughner ever saw the map or followed Palin. In fact, the gunman’s obsession with Giffords dates back to at least 2007, before Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced Palin to the nation as his vice presidential nominee.
Further, the shooter reportedly didn’t watch television, he didn’t read the news and he didn’t listen to talk radio. “He didn’t take sides. He wasn’t on the left. He wasn’t on the right,” said Loughner’s high school friend Zach Osle.
Many of these details came out soon after the shooting. Unfortunately for Palin, this didn’t happen until after some in the press had already rushed to suggest she had inspired the attack.
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, for example, blamed Palin and Glenn Beck for the shooting.
“Both are finally being held to account for recklessly playing with violent images in a way that is bound to incite the unstable,” Milbank said at that time during an appearance on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman published a blog post within hours of the shooting incident, suggesting Palin and like-minded right-wing pundits had likely inspired the tragedy with their reckless rhetoric:
Just yesterday, Ezra Klein remarked that opposition to health reform was getting scary. Actually, it’s been scary for quite a while, in a way that already reminded many of us of the climate that preceded the Oklahoma City bombing.
You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.
We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was.
Though none of these media voices should be given a pass for rushing to assign blame for the Tucson shooting, they can at least say they did not have a lot of information to work with at the time.
What’s Dvorak’s excuse?
