America has been teetering on a political knife’s edge for decades — a situation accelerated since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower and launched a campaign during which he proudly declared "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters."
The assassination of right-wing force Charlie Kirk at the hands of a Utah man with an as-yet undefined political profile has kicked the tension up to 11, with the left and right pointing fingers at each other over who is to blame.
Those tensions are reflected in the commentary of hosts and pundits across cable news networks, who have played a major role in political “discourse” since the birth of CNN in 1980 and MSNBC and the Fox News Channel in 1996.
And at no time has the contrast been as stark as this past week, with Kirk’s murder in Utah and the stabbing death of a white woman at the hands of a homeless Black man in North Carolina.
MSNBC fired commentator Matthew Dowd after he stated on air in the hours after Kirk’s shooting that:
“…hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which ultimately lead to hateful actions.”
Meanwhile, over at Fox, host Jesse Watters remains on the air after declaring:
“They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just going to have to ask ourselves. Now, Charlie would want us to put as much pressure on these people as possible.”
And in what often appears to be an effort by shows to one-up each other, Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade cranked it way past 11 with this comment about the suspect in the North Carolina slaying.
After co-host Lawrence Jones suggested homeless people have a choice: “either you take the resources that we’re going to give you, or you decide that you gotta be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now,” Kilmeade added:
“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just kill ’em.”
He too still has a job. Even after calling outright to do unto homeless people what Tyler Robinson did to Charlie Kirk.
This is simply the latest chapter of a book project I’m calling “The Slow Motion Coup: How the Legacy Media Lost the War on Truth.” The coup has been a century-long effort, started by Detroit priest Father Charles Coughlin, used radio to aim fire and brimstone against Jews.
The effort waxed and waned through the decades with Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew railing against the perceived vices of liberalism and the “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the media as Agnew declared in words written by future New York Times columnist William Safire.
The problem as the right perceived it was the lack of a voice to counter what they saw as bias and what journalists saw as reporting the facts. National Review founder — and later PBS host William F. Buckley — set out to change all that when he founded his magazine in 1955.
Nixon and Agnew were done in by their own actions. But Nixon laid the foundation for today’s alternative media when he met a local television variety show producer named Roger Ailes in 1967.
After a successful career as a political consultant — he helped shepherd the nasty, racist 1988 presidential win of George H.W. Bush over Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis — Ailes turned his attention back to media and took the reins of Fox, promising the channel would be “fair and balanced.”
Ironically he was also responsible for the creation of The America’s Talking Channel, which spun off from CNBC and eventually became MSNBC. A network he left while being investigated for allegedly calling then-NBC executive David Zaslav a "little fucking Jew prick."
Teaming with Fox founder Rupert Murdoch, the pair laid waste to “truth, justice and the American Way,” a lie-filled rampage best exemplified years after Ailes’ death by the $787.5 million defamation settlement Fox reached with Dominion Voting Systems over the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election.
Watters and Kilmeade are simply the latest in a long line of provocateurs like current host Sean Hannity as well as Tucker Carlson and Bill O’Reilly.
The Fox lineup stands in sharp contrast to MSNBC, whose most well known host is Rachel Maddow. But behind her progressive politics stands a small stable of ex-Republicans, from former Florida congressman Joe Scarborough; onetime Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele; and Nicolle Wallace, who teamed up with Dowd on the 2004 George W. Bush campaign before going solo to work with John McCain and Sarah Palin in 2008.
Dowd was somewhat chastened by his remarks and his firing likely had much to do with network president Rebecca Kutler’s business strategy as the channel prepares to separate from NBC. In his words:
“The right wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob. Even though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of my words forgotten ... and that I apologized for any miscommunication on my part, I was terminated by the end of the day.”
Trump continues to gin up that mob, promising retribution on “radical left lunatics” he has blamed, without a speck of evidence, for being solely responsible for political violence — conveniently forgetting the assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman at the hands of a “religious zealot” who had a hit list of 45 elected Democrats.
And of course agreeing that the January 6, 2021 failed insurrection was, in the words of a Georgia congressman, “a normal tourist visit.”
Still waiting for apologies from Watters and Kilmeade. For putting new meaning into the concept of who can create mayhem on Fifth Avenue — or Orem, Utah — without losing any voters.
***Kilmeade apologized on Sunday morning.
Excellent, Jerry. Thank you for take the long view and thinking it through.
Bob Sprague