There was a time, a time before cable news, when the network anchorman reigned supreme. Thank goodness those days are long gone, but like the dominant broadcasters of yore, Scott Pelley of CBS News has a voice that could make a wolverine purr. Still, it’s not clear that anyone could make sense of the words that Mr. Pelley was speaking on Thursday.
In a commentary for the “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Pelley began:
It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.
Some of the gunshot wounds might have been self-inflicted? If CBS had discovered evidence that those attending the congressional baseball practice had actually been wounded by their own bullets, rather than shots fired by James Hodgkinson, this surely would have been the scoop of the year. But Mr. Pelley quickly made clear that he and his colleagues had no such evidence. Instead, he was suggesting that the victims of the attempted assassinations might bear some blame for motivating Hodgkinson to attack:
Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.
Blaming anyone other than the shooter for attempted assassination is generally a mistake. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Mr. Pelley was intoning his commentary on the same day that victim Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was undergoing one of the series of surgeries he has required since the Wednesday attack. Last weekend his condition was upgraded to serious from critical. On Thursday, the day of the Pelley commentary, shooting victim Matt Mika was also in critical condition. Capitol Police Officer Crystal Griner was also still in the hospital on Thursday, according to CNN.
Given the timing and the circumstances that Mr. Pelley chose to make his case, one might have expected him to cite some truly damning rhetoric that had been uttered by the victims, if not direct evidence that they had incited Hodgkinson to carry out his bloody attack. One would have been wrong. The CBS voice offered not a shred of evidence that any of the shooting victims had done anything to create an “abyss of violent rhetoric,” or to inspire the actions of the man who tried to assassinate them. Instead, the anchorman mentioned a politician who was not targeted:
Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” And the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.
You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.
Mr. Pelley offered no evidence that Hodgkinson suffered from mental illness, nor did he explain how comments by Mr. Sanders could possibly raise the question of whether the victims’ wounds might be “self-inflicted.”
Believe it or not, the segment went downhill from there. The CBS newsman concluded by citing President Trump’s harsh rhetoric about his network and other media outlets, as if Mr. Pelley and his colleagues were the real victims of last week’s violence.
Coincidentally on Friday Mr. Pelley left the CBS nightly anchor chair to focus on his reports for the CBS program, “60 Minutes.” The move had been announced in May and in media terms, Mr Pelley remains kind of a big deal.
