In Fear of the Fright Wing

"I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind." - Byron Williams, who, on 18 July 2010 got into a 12 minute firefight with police, his intended target: The Tides Foundation

Okay, so what? We have some yahoo that gets a mini-arsenal and then drives down to San Francisco with the intent of putting lots of little holes in philanthropists and activists. Yes, he’s crazy. Yes, he’s wrong. Yes, it’s *expletive* evil. Does it matter that he watched Fox News? Not exactly.

Media Matters’ John Hamilton argues otherwise in “Progressive Hunter”. Mr. Hamilton suggests that, generally speaking, the right wing media outlets create a system whereby violent populist sentiment is encouraged against various groups of innocent people, and specifically tries to correlate Glenn Beck’s rhetoric with the actions of Byron Williams. To some extent he is correct, but even within the thread of his own post there are many suggestions that Beck and Fox News really shouldn’t be blamed.

First thing: Media Matters. They say on their About Us page: “Launched in May 2004, Media Matters for America put in place, for the first time, the means to systematically monitor a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation.” I do like that Media Matters admits to bias in this backhanded way. In fact, I’m not even sure we can begrudge them this detail. Fox News had been around for almost a decade and somebody felt it was time to oppose the conservative Spin Doctors. I get it. Still, there seems to be something deeply frustrating about so much effort put forth with the sole intention of stopping persons who step across one line of misinformation. Why not oppose all media misinformation?

Media Matters provides excellently brutal attacks when the conservative Echo Chamber needs to be shattered. Media Matters seems to be weaker when making assertions such as this one. Their bias leads them to misdiagnosis. Maybe even—could it be—misinformation. We should be able to safely assume, therefore, that Media Matters is going to appeal to people who are generally left of center and harbor a distaste for Fox News.

John Hamilton himself worked as a Producer for Democracy Now which seems to be one of the more legitimate sources for very left wing ideas. While they list him as a current independent journalist, he is interviewed in the above link over this story. Incidentally, he is also listed as a source for the Huffington Post over this same story. This sounds like a liberal Echo Chamber to me.

In all fairness to Mr. Hamilton he does a Herculean amount of effort to trace the history of this particularly unusual conspiracy theory and bring it full circle with a refutation by the end. He talks to Williams extensively, quoting him alongside Glenn Beck and others to try and track the genesis of Williams’ misdeeds. He includes a reasonably detailed look at the ridiculousness of the theories.

These are all great things. In fact, I would argue that the last three-fourths of the article are generally spot on. Simple quotations and facts based sentences provide a reasonable framework to assume that extremist rhetoric is dangerous when mixed with certain types of people. The reader would be then follow to his own biased (or not) conclusions.

Even here it is tricky. Mr. Hamilton wants to jump quickly over the reference to Alex Jones and get to the meatier controversy of Glenn Beck. The problem is that between Alex Jones and Glenn Beck it would seem to me that Jones would be the more likely of the two to inspire violence. Non-provable? Certainly. Nevertheless, Beck is a kitten in the vehemence of his rhetoric next to Jones. Yet Hamilton spends all his time interrogating Williams over Beck despite the fact that Williams was a follower of Jones and claims to have already reached the same conclusions as Beck. Thus there seems to be a timeline flaw in Mr. Hamilton’s explanation of events.

Even disregarding that subtle misdirection of the evidence, the problem with the latter, narrative side of this article is it entices one to make the Post Hoc Fallacy. Should we read only the non-italics part of this article, there would be a powerful sense lodged in our mind that unstable people who watch or listen to Glenn Beck have a tendency to attempt to murder innocents.

However, Mr. Hamilton doesn’t leave us that assumption to make. He forces it on us right in the first-fourth of the article, the part in italics. He states:

Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a "sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism."

Really? Mr. Hamilton is not saying because of McCarthyism all of the right wing is paranoid and delusional, but he hopes you'll subconsciously accept the idea. Mr. Hamilton does not expound on, explain, or modify Hofstadter’s assertion.

The most damming point: Mr. Hamilton states that because of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Knoxville Church bombs, and assassinations of abortion doctors “right-wing domestic terror plots are a fact of life in America.” There is no reference to the Weather Underground, Black Liberation Army, May 19^th Communist Organization, James J. Lee, Animal Liberation Front, or any other kind of Eco-Terrorism. In refusing to acknowledge that both sides have fringe crazies that will continue to use violence, Mr. Hamilton is showing himself to be not a Media Watchdog, but rather a partisan spokesperson. He is barely better than the people he critiques.

People on the right side of the argument will point to this article and say, “See, they’re calling us dangerous! We must defend our freedoms!” And the whole cycle starts all over again.