Yesterday we had a fairly spirited discussion about Sarah Palin’s video and the poor choices she made in making the video. At one point I remarked that Palin’s operation seems to be run by rightwing bloggers. Perhaps that isn’t far from the truth. WaPo’s Jonathan Bernstein did an experiment. He read the coverage of this shootings from NRO’s The Corner and found that if you only monitor rightwing news sources you may have had a skewed view of the coverage of the shootings.
But beginning very soon after the shootings, and continuing all week, the major theme has been resistance to what was presented as a systematic effort by liberals and the press to pin the attack on conservatives, and on Sarah Palin in particular. It is not presented as a story about specific politicians or pundits who made poor judgments. Nor is it presented as a reasoned discussion of whether extreme rhetoric can have unintended consequences. No; if you read just The Corner, what you’re left with is the impression that a monolithic, capitalized “Left” has been literally accusing Palin of murder.
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And if that’s true, then my point isn’t so much that The Corner’s point of view is wrong, but that anyone reading just the Corner, or getting their news from such sources, would wind up with a massively distorted sense of what liberals were saying, and what the press was reporting. The conclusions that they would draw from that version of reality might be internally consistent, but would be radically wrong.
Again, I think that conservatives had several legitimate complaints about specific things that liberals said, or that the press reported. I also think that the pro-extreme-rhetoric position is a legitimate one, if people want to engage in that debate. That’s not what I read at The Corner. Hardly any specific complaints, and little if any argument. Just a repeated drumbeat about a systematic, seemingly monolithic plan being implemented by a “Left” that surely includes every mainstream media outlet in the United States.
Sarah Palin felt it was all about Sarah Palin because that is what the rightwing has been saying.