I posited yesterday that the media’s irresponsible reaction to the Arizona shootings could well have been a “Wellstone funeral moment” for the MSM. It’s starting to look that way.
Already the media is running like 100-meter sprinters away from their initial narrative that Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement are responsible for the Arizona violence. Some papers, like The News & Observer, which ran stories citing the Palin-Tea Party accusations on Sunday, has deleted any further such references. And today they editorialized quite responsibly on the issue with only generic references to rhetoric and tone. No mention of conservatives or the John Locke Foundation or Art Pope, surprisingly.
The media is trying desperately to pivot to a new narrative, the old standby of gun control. Some politicians, of course, are still trying to slander the right, but the MSM will protect them by ignoring or downplaying their accusations. Meanwhile, media watchers on the right and left are saying the 48-hour orgy of hate from the media is the worst performance by the Fourth Estate in recent memory.
And here’s the kicker. After all this wall-to-wall spin to pin the blame on Palin and the Tea Party, the American public is saying, “B.S.”:
CBS polled almost 700 adults in the wake of the mass murder in Tucson committed by Jared Lee Loughner to determine whether the media spin that the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murders of six others was a political act had resonated with the public. Perhaps surprisingly, the spin machine seems to have failed. A majority of 57% say that politics had nothing to do with the shooting, and even a plurality of 49% of Democrats agree.
It’s pretty clear why the mainstream media is backing off it’s ludicrous original narrative.
