Despite the clear liberal agenda of postal worker Doug Hughes flying a gyrocopter into restricted Washington D.C. airspace to protest for campaign finance reform, the broadcast networks avoided linking the dangerous stunt to left-wing politics or the Democratic Party.
Such avoidance stood in stark contrast to media eagerness to falsely blame conservatives and the Republican Party for deadly acts of violence in recent years, including a man flying a plane into an IRS building in 2010, the shooting of former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, and the Colorado movie theater shooting in 2012.
All three network morning shows on Thursday noted the political motivation of Hughes. On NBC's Today, correspondent Peter Alexander briefly observed: "The pilot had hoped to spark a conversation about the state of big money in politics, but instead he began a different conversation about the state of Homeland Security."
On CBS This Morning, correspondent Vicente Arenas offered a full report examining the reason for the incident:
His website says that he grew up in California, served in the Navy and was a mailman. Well yesterday he veered off his normal route to deliver a statement about campaign finance reform....Hughes’ so-called freedom flight had been in the works for some time. In fact, the 61-year old mailman alerted he Tampa Bay Times last year after the Secret Service interviewed him about his plans....According to the Times, Hughes’ act of civil disobedience began taking shape more than two years ago after his son committed suicide. His grief prompting him to take a stand on political issues he felt were important.
On ABC's Good Morning America, co-host George Stephanopoulos actually interviewed Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times, to whom Hughes had detailed his plan:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you get word that he's finally going to pull this off. You go up to Washington, as well. Listen, if he had flown a foot or two higher, he would have gotten killed. Did you feel any responsibility to tell the authorities this was coming?
MONTGOMERY: Look, he said he was going to do this whether we were there or not. The authorities knew. He was interviewed by the Secret Service about a year before – before he took flight. He announced his flight well in advance. He left from Gettysburg, which was about an hour and a half of flight time.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So what do you think should happen to Doug now?
MONTGOMERY: I think he would want people to not view this story as, "Oh, this is lax security on the part of the Capital Police or the Secret Service," but instead, what he was really aiming for, which was we need to talk in a big way, as a nation, about whether we want unlimited corporate spending in elections. He – you know, I think – his message has kind of gotten lost in the past twenty-four hours. The idea that, like, there's big money in politics and he felt like this was the crumbing of the democracy and we need to have a conversation about campaign finance reform.
While network coverage treated the stunt as a serious security breach in the nation's capital, none of the reports attempted to connect the reckless action to heated Democratic rhetoric on the topic.
During his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama denounced the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling on campaign finance laws as something that "will open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections." An assertion that Politifact – a project of the Tampa Bay Times – deemed "mostly false."
As recently as Tuesday, Hillary Clinton called for a constitutional amendment to reverse the ruling: "We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment."
The press has been happy to smear conservatives for much more horrific actions taken by individuals who were in no way connected with a right-wing political agenda.
In 2010, after Joseph Stack committed suicide by flying a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, then-MSNBC anchor David Shuster tried to tie the incident to conservative political sentiment: "Then, last week, anti-government sentiment came to a tipping point for one deranged man in Texas. He crashed his airplane into a building that housed the Austin offices of the IRS." Stack's suicide note detailed his hatred of capitalism, not a commitment to conservative values.
In 2011, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded during a deadly shooting in Arizona, reporters rushed to suggest that conservative ideology had to be behind the brutal attack. The media even tried to blame Sarah Palin for the violence. No political motive was ever established for the crime.
In 2012, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross offered wildly irresponsible speculation that Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting suspect James Holmes may be linked to the Tea Party: "There is a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado page on the Colorado Tea Party site as well. Talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don't know if this the same Jim Holmes." It wasn't and ABC eventually corrected the egregious error.
While the flight by Hughes was not at all on the same level, it was still a reckless criminal action that could have put bystanders in real danger. Where was the press analysis of his political ideology? Where were the calls for Democrats to tone down their rhetoric to prevent such risky forms of protest?
The media double standard is shameless.
