Why The Media Shouldn’t Be Blamed For The Arizona Shooting

“Do you see that blue tree over there?” the future gunman asked his friend.

Last week it was the orange sky. Last house-party it was Jared disappearing upstairs to read a dictionary in an empty room. This isn’t normal, Zane Gutierrez thought. This isn’t sane.

Jared Lee Loughner is what happens if you think the movie Inception is real. He thought that this was all a dream. That his dream world was his true reality. The real question, then, was what bed would he really wake up in?

“Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Zane told reporters. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.” First thing he did when he woke up in this world was jot last night’s dreams down in his journal. “My favorite activity is conscience dreaming,” he fantasized in a YouTube video towards the end. When the bizarre rants got even crazier.

He claimed the United States government was using grammar to brainwash us. He insisted Washington shackled us with prepositional phrases and hyphens to rein in our thoughts. And he was obsessed with the Mayan prophecy that the world would end in 2012.

He met Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords at an open meeting back in 2007. He raised his hand and asked her, “What is government if words have no meaning?” Okaaay, Giffords thought, and delicately skipped to the next question.

Loughner never forgot the snub. He became consumed by it. “Ever since that, he thought [Giffords] was fake,” his friend Bryce Tierney recounted. “He had something against her.”

“Do you see the blue grass?” Loughner asked Zane.

Zane told Jared to go sleep with himself. And they went back to shooting cans outside his trailer with the 9 mm Glock.

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We do this every time. It’s natural. It’s what separates us from Jared Lee Loughner. We jump from shock to fear to fury. We demand to know who to blame. To find a rational scapegoat to exonerate us from this most irrational of tragedies. We try to untangle the twisted fantasies of a madman and dissect what made him snap.

The problem is we can’t. We can’t pinpoint what bloody video game, bellicose political slogan, or off-handed joke pushes a lunatic into the abyss. But that does not stop us from trying. With each youth shooting, we target a new stimulus that set him off. It’s become a Rorschach test of sorts. The coping mechanism for a grieving nation that updates with the times.

After Columbine, we pinned it on gory video games and movies. Our parents took away Doom or GoldenEye for Nintendo 64. We couldn’t rent Natural Born Killers from Blockbuster. After Virginia Tech, the state cracked down on gun control. We got a second opinion on mental health institutions.

And now, after Tucson, we’re blaming the media. We’re charging 6 deaths and 14 injured to talking heads and glossy political maps. Supped up, hyper-sensationalized commentary for nudging a lunatic to the brink. The local Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik opined, “I think it’s time that this country take a little introspective look at the [inaudible] crap that comes out on radio and TV.”

The networks are. Anchors and executives each embraced their own solemn moments of catharsis over the past week. “You can’t outsmart crazy,” Jon Stewart demurred in the first Daily Show after the shooting, “Crazy always finds a way.” FOX News chief Roger Ailes chided his commentators, “Shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don’t have to do it with bombast.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann first bitterly accused then apologized to Sarah Palin for the infamous political map with Giffords’ district in cross-hairs.

You can’t blame the cross-hairs, media outlets acknowledged. We all do it. Democrats had their own map with cross-hairs over Palin’s district back in 2007. The New York Post back page targeted Peyton Manning in cross-hairs the day before the shooting. If someone took a shot at Peyton Manning, the ladies on The View mused, the editors wouldn’t sleep very well but wouldn’t be blamed.

If the Tucson massacre becomes a referendum on turbo-charged media, all well and good. If pundits learn saying something louder doesn’t make it more right, we’re better off for it. If Democrats and Republicans sit together during the State of the Union speech, if they ratchet down the campaign slogans, it’s long overdue. But that’s not what the morale of the Tucson story is. Mellowed out rhetoric will be an unintended legacy of the Arizona shootings. An incidental consequence of a madman’s rampage.

Because the media isn’t too blame for the mayhem in the Safeway parking lot. To implicate American TV is to implicate the American TV viewer. FOX News, MSNBC and other polarized outlets only show us what we want to see. It’s a two-way street. Criticize FOX News’ tactics but the ratings show viewers are tuning in.

It’s a media Catch 22. As author Robert Entmant put it, “To become sophisticated citizens, Americans would need high-quality, independent journalism; but news organizations to stay in business while producing such journalism, would need an audience of sophisticated citizens.” In translation, we wonder why the networks can’t be more like PBS. But we don’t watch PBS.

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We love labels. We want to label Jared Lee Loughner as the newest, craziest mouthpiece for a seething, corn-fed White American rage. A right-wing extremist rage that exploded with Timothy McVeigh and has reared its ugly head again after years of economic malaise and a growing government. We want to, but it’s wrong. Loughner loathed all government and all politicians. Giffords was simply the closest one to him.

The Tucson shooting is not the media’s fault. It’s not Sarah Palin’s fault. It’s Jared Lee Loughner’s fault. We want to lump Loughner under any of these one-size-fits-all labels, but it is such blanket prescriptions that help these butchers slip through the cracks. To accuse the media of the massacre is to play their game. It’s a convenient and easy sound byte that absolves us from the true culprit: personal responsibility. It absolves us from the fact that each of these tragedies is partly the fault of neighbors who did nothing. Guidance counselor who looked the other way.

Jared Loughner isn’t the first youth shooter. He sadly won’t be the last. He is merely the latest warped product of lunacy, a broken home, timid neighbors, an indifferent school system, and porous gun control laws.

He’s another one that in hindsight was all too obvious. All the tell-tales signs were there. Quiet kid, loved Mein Kampf and quoting Nietzsche. An angry kid, who made his teachers’ nervous, got suspended, and told to get a letter from a mental health doctor if he wanted to come back. If he felt like it.

He came from a dysfunctional family that withdrew into itself and a shuttered up house. The irascible dad, the silent mother. Kick a soccer ball into the Loughner’s backyard, neighbors sighed, and you were buying a new one. The police came by the house a couple times to check them out, but nothing stuck. Anger in the first degree isn’t a punishable offense. And the delusions grew…

People who knew Jared Lee Loughner knew that Jared Lee Loughner was unstable. Dangerous, even. But they hoped that he would simply go away. That he would become someone else’s problem. Until he became all of ours.

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“Did you hear what I said?” the FBI agent asked the gunman.

But Loughner just sat there, looking down at his shackles. He has reportedly barely said a word since he was taken into custody. He wakes up every morning in his bunk in the Federal Correctional Institute in Phoenix without his dream book. Death penalty or life in prison, either way he will never see the blue trees again.

This is his new reality.

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Please check back next week for Part II.

See Also: I’d like to try to understand this, Chuck Todd says we all need to look in the mirror, An American Family, 300 Million Strong, The Real Problem, Friend Reveals Insight Into Jared Lee Loughner & Possible Motives, The Giffords Tragedy: Is the Media Partly at Fault?, Infants Playing with Flamethrowers, and Giffords: Palin Put Crosshairs on District, So Must ‘Realize There Are Consequences to That Action’.