NY Times Reporters Defend Paper's Coverage of Tucson Shootings, Dubiously Denies It Blamed the Right Wing

JAMES TARANTO: Leave Kate Zernike Alone: She is a good reporter. The New York Times is a corrupt i
James Taranto: Leave Kate Zernike Alone: She is a good reporter. The New York Times is a corrupt institution. “How corrupt? So corrupt that the Hulse-Zernike piece was, by the standards of the Times last week, a relatively minor case of journalistic malpractice. Even the editors who assigned it at least have the excuse of having been under deadline pressure at a time when the facts were not yet in ab...

After Tucson, Blanket Accusations Leave Much to Interpretation
By JEREMY W. PETERS and Brian Stelter NYT FOR every action in politics today, there’s an overwhelming and opposite reaction. Last week, the reaction came from conservative politicians who bridled at suggestions in the media that Jared L. Loughner may have been influenced by right-wing Rhetoric and Talk Radio when he killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a rampage on Jan. 8 in Tucson. In her video address on Wednesday, Sarah Palin said that Journalists and...

Right-wingers want to make Obama's message in Tucson into vindication for their hatemongering
You just knew that when President Obama issued his call for a return to civility last week in Tucson, folks on the right would happily embrace the simple standard he elucidated -- "It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds" -- to everyone but themselves. Delightful. Now, I don't hold Mr. Maher to the same standard as The Washington Post because he's a comedian, a man who makes a living expressing a p...

Joe Scarborough to right wing: Stop whining about shooting!
Well, take a look at this. Joe Scarborough, in an open letter of sorts to Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, has managed the impossible. He says Beck and Palin are not to blame for the shooting, while simultaneously saying that asking whether incendiary Rhetoric can lead to violence is a perfectly valid line of inquiry: You weren't personally responsible for the slaughter at the Safeway. Maybe you can put it on a poster at the next "Talkers" convention. But before you and the pack of right-wing pole...

Your Tax Paying Dollars At Work In Tucson, And Elsewhere
In the ensuing days after the Tucson shooting, the Federal Government has sent a slew of people there to work with the locals in trying to figure out just what the heck was going on with Jared Loughner, as this Washington Post article highlights: A team of 250 federal investigators and 130 local detectives trying to understand why Jared Lee Loughner went on his alleged Killing Spree has conducted more than 300 interviews with family, friends and neighbors since the shooting. But they remain stu...

Evening Open Thread
I held off commenting about this particular facet of the Loughner saga, because it seemed to be just me and the Jezebel Staffers, and you know what they say about feminists and their endless outrage. But now a respectable Y-chromosome bearer has spoken out, as Tom Scocca at Slate wonders if “Maybe Jared Loughner Was a Bigot, After All“: Now, via the New York Times, there’s word that there was more going on in Jared Loughner’s headspace than odd-colored dreamscapes and cry...

Giffords's Husband Heard His Wife Had Died in Tucson
While racing to his wife’s side, Mark Kelly, the husband of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, heard from erroneous television news reports that his wife had been killed when she was shot outside of a Safeway Supermarket in Tucson on Jan. 8, he said in a televised interview on Tuesday evening. In an interview on ABC’s “20/20,” Mr. Kelly said he initially learned that his wife had been shot during a very brief telephone conversation with one of her Staffers. Then, as he sat on a friend...

NYT: No widespread blame of the right for Arizona shooting
Conservatives are outraged -- outraged! -- that the traditional media has spent the last week blaming them and their violent Rhetoric for the shooting in Arizona. Just one problem: it's not true. According to the New York Times: Last week, the reaction came from conservative politicians who bridled at suggestions in the media that Jared L. Loughner may have been influenced by right-wing Rhetoric and Talk Radio when he killed six people and gravely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a ...

Three Exculpatory Facts the MSM Continues to Overlook in the Arizona Shootings
Last night Sarah Palin appeared on Sean Hannity’s show for her first interview since the Arizona shootings. During the exchange she quoted Martin Luther King Jr. who said “A lie cannot live.” If only it were so. But as Allapundit pointed out last night, a new poll shows that this particular lie-that Sarah Palin’s Facebook map played a role in the mind of Jared Loughner-has been embraced by 56% of Democrats and 34% of Independents. It’s pointless to bla...

Reason.tv: The Week in Stupid - Cable Pundits on the Gifford Shooting
Immediately following last week's tragic events in Tucson, television pundits fell over each another to assign blame. According to the professional talking heads--and despite any actual evidence--the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords could be pinned on the Tea Party, Ayn Rand, gold enthusiasts, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, heavy metal, marijuana, and/or the "heated Rhetoric" of Cable News. Reason.tv trawls the archives and compiles the dumbest responses from America's dumbest pundits. Approximate...

Lawmakers Rejoin Health Care Fray
(NewsCore) - The House plunged back into an inflammatory debate on Health Care Tuesday, as lawmakers sought to convey their passions about the Obama Administration's overhaul without overstepping the vague lines of civility drawn in the wake of the shootings in Arizona. Republicans have scheduled a Repeal vote Wednesday as one of their first acts since winning a House majority. It is not expected to succeed, because Democrats control the Senate and the White House, but the vote could set the sta...

The right's Tucson bait and switch (Politico)
In the week since the Tucson, Ariz., massacre, pleas for “civility” have turned into accusations of Incivility, and the whole, useful discussion of “civility” versus “vitriol” has turned into the usual argument over competitive victimhood. The vast right-wing Conspiracy has played President Barack Obama like a violin. And they’ve done a pretty good job of messing with the heads of the liberal media as well. As a result, anyone who even raises the issue o...

Donald Kaul: The Right to Bear Arms, Even if You're Nuts
Say what you will about the attempted Assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Add in the Murder and severe injuries suffered by assorted bystanders in Tucson and it all proves that we're still a free country. God bless America! Where else can a certifiable loony who looks like Charlie Manson's creepy cousin walk into a gun store and buy a semi-automatic pistol that shoots 30 rounds (30!) in just a few seconds? And then walk around with it, no questions asked? The result: six dead and ...

Surrendering the language
From CNN’s John King: “Before we go to break, I want to make a quick point. We were having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race. My friend Andy Shaw used the term ‘in the cross-hairs’ in talking about the Candidates. We’re trying, we’re trying to get away from that language. Andy is a good friend, he’s covered politics for a long time, but we’re trying to get away from that kind of language.” What? No more target audience? No more po...

'Morgan' debut draws nearly 2.1 million viewers
CNN says "Piers Morgan Tonight" drew nearly 2.1 million viewers to its premiere Monday night. The debut featured an interview with Oprah Winfrey and more than tripled the average audience for "Larry King Live," which Morgan's show replaces. CNN said Tuesday that the show ranked second among cable-news Talk Shows at that hour, behind Fox News Channel's "Hannity," but ahead of MSNBC's "The Rachel Maddow Show." "Piers Morgan Tonight" airs weeknights on CNN at 9 p.m. Eastern time. CNN is owned by Ti...

NYT Public Editor Arthur Brisbane Almost Admits Liberal Bias Skewed Tucson Coverage
On Saturday, the New York Times's Public Editor offered a milquetoast apologia for the paper's leading role in falsely ascribing blame for the Tucson massacre to conservative pundits and politicians. Nowhere in the column did Public Editor Arthur Brisbane address columnist Paul Krugman's false smear of Rep. Michele Bachmann, noted in a letter sent by NewsBusters to Brisbane's office on Friday. Brisbane attributed the rush to blame, at least in part, Sarah Palin and other conserva...

Democratic lawmaker: Repealing health reform is 'killing Americans'
Repealing Healthcare Reform would result in "killing Americans," one Democratic lawmaker suggested Tuesday night. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (R-Texas), in a Speech on the House floor about the Rhetoric surrounding Republicans' bill to undo the new Healthcare Reform law, said that Repeal would result in more Deaths in the U.S. "Frankly, I would just say to you, this is about saving lives. Jobs are very important; we created jobs," Jackson Lee said. "But even the title of their Legislation, H.R. ...

Sarah Palin's poll numbers go down after 'blood libel' Facebook post
The headline of the Public Policy Polling (PPP) article published today says "Palin shoots herself in the foot."  While one may argue with the wording of the post, it would be hard to argue with the numbers behind it.  According to PPP survey many Americans, including a plurality of Republicans, did not approve of Palin's 'blood Libel' Facebook post following the Arizona shootings.  Even worse for Palin, she now trails President Obama by a much wider margin in a potential 2012 pre...

The Lesson of Michael Steele
American political parties are loose associations that lack any kind of formal structures. The two parties stretch across three broad categories -- the electorate, the party organization in place to facilitate the campaign, and the government. None of these parts of the party is formally connected to any other part, and even within each category there is not a great deal of coherence. Within the government, there is a party in the House and a party in the Senate, totally distinct from each other...

Breaking--man arrested for Tea Party threats has questionable history
On Saturday, January 15, one week after the Tucson massacre that resulted in the death of a Federal Judge and the injury of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, one of the Shooting Victims, James Eric Fuller, was arrested for allegedly threatening a speaker at a Tea Party gathering in Tucson. After an entire week of maligning Conservatives, the Tea Party movement, and conservative Talk Radio for the shootings, the Mainstream Media barely mentioned the Death Threat against Tea Party speaker and co-l...

How The Mainstream Media REALLY Creates its Israel-Palestinian News
By Barry Rubin How incredibly bad is media coverage of Israel-Palestinian issues and of the Middle East in general? Here’s an example. CNN has just run a report on how wonderfully moderate the Palestinian Authority (PA) is. They are firing imams of West Bank Mosques who are spewing out incitement against Israel! Well, first of all this claim began five months ago, when the PA started peddling it, and I wrote about it almost three months ago, after liberal American Jews began citing it as...

Far Right Zeitgeist Hates Fox News
God bless Maggie, she sat through the entire bizarre, psychedelic, Zeitgeist film series. She deserves a medal. Since I don’t have a medal, links to her posts will have to do. So much for the claim that Zeitgeist is Right Wing. The Cult of Zeitgeist and Jared Loughner - Part 1 The Cult of Zeitgeist and Jared Loughner - Part 2 The conclusion, Zeitgeist is definitely not Right Wing. Unless you consider hatred of Fox News to be Right Wing. Note: If you haven’t been paying attentio...

Ethan Casey: Is America Any Different from Pakistan?
Seattle, JANUARY 12 - So now we know: The American Right Wing knows no shame and apparently will stop at nothing to bully the rest of us into shutting up and taking whatever they dish out. On the sound principle -- understood by right-wingers but not by liberals -- that the best defense is a good offense, Sarah Palin has released a self-exonerating video statement asserting that "acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own." The right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin has coined the phrase "Tu...

MSNBCs Richard Wolffe Says Sarah Palin Refreshingly Honest but Self-Serving in Tucson Response
After today’s White House briefing, I caught up with MSNBC contributor and author Richard Wolffe to get his take on the media’s handling of Sarah Palin in the wake of the Mass Shooting in Tucson, and Palin’s handling of it, as well. Wolffe said he thought Palin was “refreshingly honest” at times in her interview with Sean Hannity , but criticized her “self-serving” overreaches, and defended the Mainstream Media’s coverage of Palin as part of the Tu...

My Last Words on Loughner?
I hope so. At least until the trial. There’s not a whole lot more meaning that can be derived from the event, in my opinion, and when even the NYT is delivering pseudo-apologies through its Ombudsman, it seems as though the forces of slander are in full retreat, even though dead-enders like Kinsley don’t know that they’ve had their asses handed to them, yet. Even Time recognizes it’s a losing call. The feds who have searched through the evidence with the kind of thoroughn...