In the past couple days, I’ve had a couple brushes with the wider world, and it feels a little funny. I’ll take them one at a time.
First: on Sunday afternoon, my boss called me at home to see if I was available to do some quick research and write up what I found on Bill O’Reilly’s history of attacks on assassinated Kansas Dr. George Tiller. I wasn’t aware that O’Reilly had such a history, but I know a thing or two about using Nexis, and in a couple of hours, I’d found that 29 separate episodes of The O’Reilly Factor had gone after Tiller, often in highly charged language. This article was the result.
The piece was first to the punch, and got some attention. A lot, in fact, culminating in this article by Brian Stelter in the New York Times today, on the free speech issues raised by criticism of O’Reilly, of which my piece was the foremost example. Stelter wrapped up with this quote from a law professor:
In every complex political setting, there’s a tendency to single out the loudest of the other side and claim that what they’re doing is not political speech but is incitement. It’s important not to allow that to happen. It would have a dramatic effect on the ability to speak vigorously.
As it happens, I agree with that entirely. What O’Reilly was doing was political speech. The fact that it was wildly overheated does not constitute grounds for legal action of any kind, nor should it. But Stelter is doing here what O’Reilly himself always does: assume that criticism infringes on free speech. Questoning O’Reilly does not constitute a call for a ban. A vigorous assault on Bill O’Reilly for his choice of words need not, in any sense, prompt a debate over free speech.
What I think is interesting about all of this is the assumption that I must know something that I didn’t reveal in the article. Pajamas Media accused me of “implying” that O’Reilly “incited the murder”; Reason did much the same, calling me “deeply censorious” and saying that I “strongly hint that O’Reilly played an unwitting, offstage role in Tiller’s death.” To which I’d respond that I didn’t “imply” or “hint” anything. The article is not a novel, and is best read as text, not subtext. I wrote the article, and it says what it says. It never accuses O’Reilly of being responsible, merely of acting irresponsibly. Subjecting O’Reilly to intense criticism, which I think he merits, is not a coded call for censorship.
Look, I don’t think it really should require that much sophistication to acknowledge that,
- The chances are quite good that Scott Roeder killed George Tiller regardless of what Bill O’Reilly in particular said.
- Bill O’Reilly contributed significantly to a generally dangerous atmosphere of paranoia, powerlessness, and hatred on the anti-abortion right, and helped focus it on Tiller, and this merits criticism, even if Scott Roeder didn’t see the show once.
- An action can be observed to have been irresponsible—very much so—in hindsight, even if it did not directly cause the tragedy causing the retrospective examination. To borrow from the language used by O’Reilly, if we found out that someone had been a priest in Munich in the 1920s, who occasionally peppered his sermons with nasty anti-semitism, we would denounce this person and this behavior as especially loathsome and demanding criticism given its context, regardless of whether we knew if Hitler himself ever heard the anti-semitic sermons.
Next up, my encounter with Michelle Malkin.
