For the second day in a row, Fox host Gretchen Carlson seemed reluctant to take her expert’s word for it that the shooting of WDBJ’s white reporter and cameraman by an apparently racist black gunman was not a hate crime.
Yesterday, a few hours after the horrific on-air murders of WDBJ’s Alison Parker and Adam Ward by a disgruntled former employee, Carlson argued to security expert Paul Viollis that it looked like a hate crime. He called it workplace violence:
“He (the shooter) put the initials of the Charleston church shooting victims on the bullets that he used today, he praised the Virginia Tech mass killer, Columbine High School killers, says he was being attacked for being a gay black man,” she said. “He shot three white people today. Why is that not a hate crime?”
...“Because of the fact that the workplace violence offender is clearly delusional,” he explained. “They make up their own sense of reality, and they struggle with their sense of identity. So they don’t like who they are, they make up something that will envision them as a victim, as the quintessential victim. It’s the finger-pointing.”
Viollis continued, “Hate crime is something where he clearly was motivated by sense of race, color or creed.”
Today, Carlson continued her quest to make the killings hate crimes. But she got, more or less, the same answer, this time from former prosecutor Diana Aizman.
AIZMAN: Why did this particular murderer choose these particular victims? He chose them maybe on the basis of race but primarily, the evidence shows that it was on the basis of some personal interaction that he had with them that was not racially related.
But Carlson said it “must be a fine line sometimes” because the shooter had, apparently, accused victim Parker of making racist remarks against him. “Would that fall into the category?” she asked.
“Not necessarily,” Aizman said. “Because it sounds more like it was retribution against something that she said that he didn’t agree with, as opposed to him targeting her specifically because she was white.”
Aizman said that if the shooter had randomly selected victims based on their race, “That would be clearly a hate crime and obviously, this is a finer line but still there would have to be evidence, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, that the actual motivation of the attack was the race and I just don’t think that exists here.”
So Carlson turned to the shooter’s manifesto “that says he was inspired by another race-related crime which was the Charleston shootings.” Carlson noted that he claimed the bullets he used to kill Parker and Ward had the Charleston victims’ names on them. “Does that say anything to you with regard to how you classify the crime?” Carlson asked.
Aizan said it certainly “points to the fact that he is a racist,” that he might have justified his actions “as some sort of vigilante justice” and if he had lived, he might have gone on to commit some hate crime. But, again, she said, “Realistically, I still don’t think that this particular attack, taken by itself on its face, rises to the level of a hate crime.”
“Great to get your expertise,” Carlson said.
Despite Carlson’s apparent insistence that there must be a hate crime here somewhere, I suspect that the hate crime obsession comes from the top more than from herself. For one thing, Carlson’s show is one of the more reasonable ones on Fox. For another, there’s the fact that both of her experts (whose opinions are always known via a pre-screening) shot down the hate crime theory. The show could have booked a racial flame-thrower like Sheriff David Clarke, for example, instead.
Not that that excuses anything, it just puts a fine point on what Fox might be up to here.
Watch it below, from the August 27 The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson.
That’s pretty much it.
I guess Steve Doocy, Tucker Carlson, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck skipped Bill O’Reilly’s show last night (in addition to Gretchen’s mentioned here) where he blamed his favorite whipping boy: secular progressives. ;^)
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a bit more subtle with Fox- Their site was absolutely full of little water tests, and Fox Nation was drawing the line only at the wholesale use of the N-Word, not that I didn’t find a few examples of that. On the network, however? Carlson’s the only host I saw say it outright. Bolling wasn’t exactly a model of Subtlety, but Gutfeld had his “You’re awesome, but not until the boss says!” pants on.
Today, they’re much more open- The hosts that wouldn’t go there, their guests did. This is gonna be their thing, not that anyone’s surprised.
Though I was shocked to find people saying “Oh, well… I never heard it!”. Not even a spin on what they meant, just flat denial it was said at all.