Watchdog: Left Exploiting Arizona Ram Page To ‘Criminalize’ Conservatives

The left’s systematic ridicule of Sarah Palin and other conservatives following the Arizona shooting rampage reflects a deliberate campaign to “ultimately criminalize” conservative thought in America, according to media watchdog L. Brent Bozell.

Bozell’s comments in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview came as 22-year-old Jared Loughner appeared in federal court in Phoenix on Monday on charges of trying to assassinate U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. The shooting spree Saturday at a Safeway supermarket north of Tucson left six dead and 13 wounded. The judge ordered that Loughner be held without bail.

Bozell, founder and president of the conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, isn’t alone in his concern about the media coverage of the rampage.

Top radio talker Rush Limbaugh weighed in as well Monday, saying on his show that coverage of the Arizona shooting has been a “lame, purely political attempt by the left to do what they cannot convince the American people to do, and that is support them. It’s embarrassingly, depressingly sick.”

Limbaugh added “half the country has been indicted for the actions of a lone, deranged individual.”

Also, CNN “Reliable Sources” host Howard Kurtz denounced the effort to link conservative political rhetoric to the shooting as a “sickening ritual of guilt by association,” adding that “the blame game is already underway.”

Those reactions, however, did not dissuade MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Democratic Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., from doubling down on their attacks.

“He saw a Second Amendment remedy and that's what occurred here and there is no way not to make that connection," Clyburn said Monday, according to The Charleston Post & Courier – a reference to senate candidate Sharron Angle of Nevada reportedly speaking of a possible “Second Amendment remedy” people could use to address their grievances.

Bozell said such efforts to blame the Tucson massacre on conservatives reflect a broader agenda.

“This is a part of a campaign to delegitimize, and ultimately criminalize, conservative thought in this country,” Bozell said. “Note how quickly The New York Times came out with an editorial calling for the Fairness Doctrine as a result of this.

“I mean, anything to pin to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or the Tea Party … anybody on the conservative side, to delegitimize them, that’s what they’re going to do. That’s the tactics of the far left.”

From a journalistic perspective, Bozell said, the news media should be graded “close to an F” for its coverage.

“Because they have committed a mortal sin,” he said. “They have raised as fact, or at least [for] serious consideration, things that are simply not true.

“And [they] are in such a rush to implicate conservatives when evil things happen that they were doing that before they had even the basic facts of the story down. Before they had even knew the gender of the poor child who was killed, they were already suggesting that Sarah Palin might be to blame.”

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