Keith Olbermann: O'Reilly and FOX created the climate for Dr. Tiller's Murder

Keith Olbermann says it so well: O'Reilly in particular, and FOX in general, were instrumental in whipping up the frenzy--with oft-repeated buzzwords and catchphrases that rhyme with the murdered doctor's name, for example--that grew and swelled, the way frenzies tend to do, and inevitably led to an act of extremism. In this case, a deadly, criminal, and irreversible act of extremism.

Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley appeared on Rachel Maddow's program and stated that First Amendment rights, particularly freedom of speech, meant it would be very difficult to successfully prosecute O'Reilly or any other talking head for incitement. Indeed, he said protected speech was a very broad category that even included what he referred to as "hate speech".

And he's right. O'Reilly can always just state that he is entitled to his opinion, and that's really all he was doing here: expressing his opinion, based on the facts, and the facts do include the number of abortions that Dr. Tiller performed and where he performed them.

Never mind that O'Reilly's protected speech, in its typically polarizing way, conveniently left out the compelling and heartbreaking stories behind those late-term abortions themselves: women whose pregnancies had gone terribly, tragically wrong and who had to choose between a third-trimester termination and leaving their other children motherless; child rape victims; babies without vital organs; conjoined twins whose brief, pain-wracked lives--in the unlikely event they survived birth--would be spent hooked up to wires, tubes, and ventilators.

Never mind that O'Reilly's protected speech was presented in the form of glib, soundbite-ish rhyming slogans and repeated over and over. Never mind that his campaign against OB/GYN Dr. Tiller--and ultimately, against a woman's right to bodily autonomy, period--was a classic case of propaganda that employed standard techniques: ad nauseam reinforcement, black-and-white fallacy, demonizing the enemy, half-truths, name-calling, oversimplification, repetition, scapegoating, and of course, the use of slogans and virtue words.

Never mind that O'Reilly's protected speech enjoyed a multiplier factor, unimaginable to the Constitution's framers, in that it was electronically broadcast to millions of American ears and eyes, simultaneously. And then, repetitively.

I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool First Amendment supporter: Words have consequences, and so do viruses, often to a deadly degree. In protecting the former--as we surely must--let us not enable the proliferation of the latter.

Also at litbrit.

Comments

[Lisa Simeone]

Copying and pasting from the Comments section of the NYT "Opinionator" blog titled "Was Dr. Tiller’s Death a ‘Moral’ Murder?":

3. June 1, 2009
10:41 am

Your headline is an abomination. This enabling of the “moral murder” claim by even the “liberal” New York Times ensures that cold-blooded, murdering psychopaths like Roeder, and in publishing the incitement to murder more abortion providers from the likes of RedState wothout comment, is journalistic malpractice.

Do you similarly publish exhortations to bomb US government buildings or murder government officials by extreme anti-war groups, for example? No, you don’t.

Furthermore, you never find time to publish tales like this, which suggest that Tiller was anything but a “baby killer”:

” In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. ”

Your constant capitulation to the threats and propaganda of the right wing in search of “balance” for which these extremists will never give you credit is one of the primary reasons your paper will soon cease to exist. And, as long as you treat incitement to murder fellow American citizens as worthy of this type of uncritical coverage, I say good riddance.

— brewmn

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/did-the-murder-of-dr-tiller-work/?scp=2&sq=%22domestic%20terrorism%22&st=cse

[litbrit]

Absolutely brilliant, heartbreaking comment. Thank you for posting it, Lisa.

[nimh]

Amen, Litbrit - and brewmn.

[Corvus9]

I really hate the mainstream media. Especially newspapers.