Howie Kurtz: Why Should The Media Care That Spree-Killer Chris Dorner Is a Huge, Huge Fan of Ours?

First of all, I'm sure you already know this (and I think cobloggers covered this already), but the media is actually deleting the parts of the manifesto that praise them.

Howard Kurtz asked, should we care about Chris Dorner's love of CNN and MSNBC hosts?

But notice that question contains no context -- the context being that the media has always treated it as supremely consequential that a murderous lunatic was a big fan of Sarah Palin. (Even when, in fact, Lougner wasn't a fan of Sarah Palin -- something the NYT has now eradicated from the record, obliterating its previous claims that Palin inspired Loughner, without acknowledging the correction and retraction.)

Now, if you just ask someone, "Does it matter if Chris Dorner, a kill-crazy maniac, was a big fan of CNN and MSNBC?," their natural reaction will be "No, of course not; what does it matter whom he watches on TV, and what does it matter from whom he takes his political cues? Politics has nothing to do with murder."

That's what a normal, reasonable, level-headed person would say. But that's not how the media has played such coverage for the past four years.

The media, of course, has attempted to claim that virtually every notorious killer of the past few years is a Tea Partier or has some connection to the right.

Now, if Howard Kurtz was asking the question properly, he'd ask, Should the media care if Dorner is a huge fan of liberal reporters, given the fact that these same liberal reporters have attempted to claim that other murders were the responsibility of commentators on the right??

Now, when you ask it that way, the reasonable normal viewer says, "Well, of course then they should take an interest; the same rule should be applied equally to all parties. And if it's a dumb rule, then the entire rule should be discarded, not just selectively applied against people in the opposite party as CNN and MSNBC."

But, because asking it that way would provoke that answer, Howard Kurtz, "media critic," doesn't ask it that way.

More: Chris Dorner's fan club continues expanding.

I am trying to find out now if a CNN host actually returned Chris Dorner's praise right back to him.

Popehat is a guy who's very suspicious of police -- he keeps up with all the stories of police abuse and corruption, so he understands what most of us miss, that is, yes, there really are some very very bad apples in the police.

So what's his position on Chris Dorner?

Well, he has a common-sense position: Given that this guy is a lunatic who's murdering the children of alleged "enemies," maybe people shouldn't go assuming his claims of persecution are true.

Pretty much every maniac who shoots up an office after a firing claims he was poorly treated by management and the Victim of Conspiracies So Vast as to Beggar the Imagination.

But reasonable people don't assume their blood-soaked Letters of Complaint are true.

And yet... some people really seem to be jumping on the Chris Dorner, Hero bandwagon.

posted by Ace at 07:01 PM

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