Back in June, liberal columnists at the New York Times lined up to link conservative talkers Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh to James von Brunn, the 88-year-old man who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum, and the murder by Scott Roeder of abortionist George Tiller.

Columnists Paul Krugman and Judith Warner both weighed in on June 12.

Krugman’s “The Big Hate” blamed Fox host Bill O’Reilly’s rhetoric (“Tiller the baby killer”) for the Tiller murder, as well as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, for contributing to the dangerously toxic atmosphere.

Warner’s online entry, “The Wages of Hate,” read: “You can't accuse Beck or Limbaugh of inciting violence. But they almost certainly do stoke the flames.”

Frank Rich also blamed O’Reilly for the Tiller murder in his Sunday column, "The Obama Hater's Silent Enablers," two days later.

• Networks Decide Attack Wasn't Terror: 85 percent of the broadcast stories didn't mention the word "terror." ABC, CBS, and NBC evening news referenced terrorism connections to the Fort Hood attack just seven times in 48 reports.
• ABC, CBS, NBC Follow White House Line: Before Obama's Nov. 10 speech, 93 percent of the stories had ignored any terror connection. But after Obama hinted at what ABC called "Islamic extremist views," all three networks mentioned terrorism.
• Alleged Attacker's Muslim Faith Not Important Either: Slightly more than one-fourth (29 percent) of evening news reports mentioned that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a Muslim. Of those, half (7 out of 14) defended the religion or included experts to do so.

Last week, Fort Hood, Texas was the site of the worst mass shooting in history on a U.S. military base. At 2:34 p.m. local time on Nov. 5, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan - one of the military's own - reportedly attacked fellow soldiers, yelling, "Allah Akbar." He then allegedly fired more than 100 rounds into Fort Hood's crowded processing center, killing 13 and wounding 29. This heinous act stunned the nation and captivated the news media.

Katie Couric’s CBS Evening News on Friday omitted any mention of the murder of pro-life activist Jim Pouillon in Michigan, despite having discussed the murder of abortionist George Tiller on the June 1, June 2 and June 9 newscasts (and then referencing the killing as a recent “hate crime” in a June 10 report on the shooting at Washington, D.C.’s Holocaust Museum).

Both ABC’s World News and the NBC Nightly News, in contrast, offered full reports on the killing of Pouillon and a local businessman, but offered different explanations. According to NBC’s John Yang, prosecutors said the killer, Harlan Drake, had grudges against his victims and another intended target but “none of them were specifically related to anti- or pro-abortion beliefs.”

Over on ABC, however, reporter Chris Bury showed a soundbite from the Owosso police chief that sure sounded like a grudge against Pouillon’s protests: “Mr. Drake did not believe the children should view the graphic material that was on the signs that Mr. Pouillon carried.”

And ABC’s Bury claimed Friday’s killing of the peaceful protester represented “the flip side of the troubling violence surrounding the abortion debate,” and equated the pro-life activist with the doctor who performed late-term abortions: “George Tiller and Jim Pouillon, on opposite sides of the abortion divide, but both victims of the hate that too often surrounds it.”

To see how public radio talk-show hosts in every college town pick up Bill Moyers talking points off PBS like manna falling from Manhattan, there’s this paragraph that appeared on ProfNet, a radio-booking service for political experts, from a Jim Lynch of WUSB 90.1 in Stony Brook, New York:

I'm seeking interviews with individuals with expertise on the increasing call of hate radio and television programs to "kill liberals" -- from the Kansas killing of a physician performing legal women's health services, to the church killings at liberal UU congregation in Tennessee, to the threats against Michael Moore and others. This is for "Everything is Broken," which airs Tuesdays at 1 p.m. This will be conversational and non-confrontational; no call-ins from listeners. Must be available for 30+ minutes.

On Friday, June 12, the PBS program Now (formerly hosted by Bill Moyers) devoted most of its half-hour to the complaints of late-term abortionists Warren Hern and LeRoy Carhart smearing the pro-life movement. Hern called it a "terrorist movement," and Carhart said despite the flood of pro-life group press releases denouncing George Tiller’s murder, the movement’s "heart was certainly with Scott Roeder on the day he shot Dr. Tiller."

The only outbreak of a pro-life viewpoint in Maria Hinojosa’s report (it ran more than 20 minutes) was a set of clips of Bill O’Reilly denouncing "Tiller the Baby Killer." (The screen on PBS very clearly read "Daily Kos TV.") Ken Bode, a former NBC and CNN reporter and PBS host now serving as an ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, praised this incredibly one-sided segment and agreed that O’Reilly is guilty of aiding terrorists:

This needs no setup -- in the right corner, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly; in the left corner, Salon's Joan Walsh (second more fiery part below the fold):

Michael Rowe has an article on the Huffington Post, posted today, that makes a few wild-eyed claims about right-wing extremists.

For example, Ann Coulter is responsible for yesterday’s tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum.

Bill O’Reilly is responsible for the shooting of well-known abortion doctor George Tiller.

Oh, and the coup de grace: Sarah Palin and all of her supporters are raging racists.

That’s not to mention the implication that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck, and all of Fox News were the favorite news sources of James von Brunn, now-infamous shooter at the Holocaust museum.

Idiotic though these claims most certainly are, liberal bilge of this magnitude demands confrontation.  First, examine what Rowe wrote on Ann Coulter:

ABC gave pro-abortion advocates free advertising last night with its "World News Sunday." During the report, an abortionist unequivocally stated that late-term abortion is "really a miscarriage of a stillborn fetus."

Anchor Dan Harris framed Steve Osunsami's segment  as a look at why doctors risk their lives to perform abortions given the "constant threat" of violence they face, as evidenced by last week's murder of abortionist George Tiller and recent comments from Tiller's accused killer that "similar attacks are planned all over the country."

Harris teased the segment "Tonight, we talk to late-term abortion providers who fear they are targets. Why do they do it?" He stated in his introduction, "Why would a doctor take that risk? And why would a woman make that choice?"

Over at Get Religion, Mollie Z. Hemingway lamented how reporters are trying to use the murder of late-term abortionist George Tiller at church to challenge "popular perceptions" that abortionists can’t be a "faithful member of the Lutheran church" and love Jesus. Take this vomit-inducing introduction to a Religion News Service article by Lindsay Perna and Tiffany Stanley:

Dr. George Tiller's murder last Sunday morning in the lobby of his Lutheran church counters the secular image of a late-term abortion provider, pinning him more as a churchgoing "martyr" than a godless murderer.

Shot and killed while passing out bulletins in the lobby of his Wichita, Kan., church as his wife sat in the choir, Tiller is already challenging popular perceptions of both abortion providers and the abortion-rights movement.

On Thursday night's O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly lit into NARAL publicist Mary Alice Carr for her Washington Post op-ed blaming him for the murder of abortionist George Tiller -- and following up on the NewsBusters report on her article's reckless factual errors, whacked her for lying:

Writing in The Washington Post today, pro-abortion zealot Mary Alice Carr says, quote, "O'Reilly is being incredibly disingenuous when he claims that he bears no responsibility for others' actions in the killing of Dr. George Tiller on Sunday. When you tell an audience of millions over and over again that someone is an executioner, you cannot feign surprise when someone executes that person. O'Reilly knew that people wanted Tiller dead. He knows that his words incite violence."

Well, that is a complete bull. We analyzed Tiller honestly, and I'm entitled to my opinion on his methods.

MSNBC’s partisan-in-chief Keith Olbermann used his “Worst Person in the World” segment on Thursday evening to falsely accuse pro-life blogger Jill Stanek of posting the “addresses of the only two remaining physicians who will provide late-term abortions when the woman’s life is in danger,” thus enabling “a bunch of crazy people, like your readers, where they can find somebody and abuse, threaten, or kill them.”

Stanek actually did not post addresses of the two abortionsts, LeRoy Carhart and Warren Hern, in the two items in which she included pictures of Cahart’s drab-looking center. The former nurse, who achieved notoriety for her testimony about the exposure deaths of infants who survived their late-term abortions at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, pointed out in her retort to Olbermann that the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press had done the something similar- posting pictures of both physicians’ centers. She also snarked back that “Keith had best make Google the ‘Worst Search Engine in the World!’ for posting a map and directions to Carhart’s Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska and Hern’s Boulder Abortion Clinic.”

Just like audio offered on the National Public Radio website, NPR transcripts in Nexis do not include top-of-the-hour newscasts. But a quick Nexis search finds there is no mention of the Monday shooting of Private William Long at a Little Rock recruiting station by a Muslim convert. I searched for "William Long," "army private," and "Little Rock."

Meanwhile, Nexis lists NPR has aired seven full stories or interview segments on the Sunday shooting of late-term abortionist George Tiller.

This is the only listing for Little Rock in the last week: a Tuesday story on master accordionist Steve Jordan:

The backroom studio is crammed with all the equipment they need to mix and produce albums on their own. The first CD will be titled "Carta Espiritual," "Letter to God;" quite different from earlier compositions like "Piedrecita," "The Little Rock," a paean to cocaine, but you won't hear a sample of it here. I tried. Jordan is famously paranoid about people ripping off his music.

On Wednesday’s Democracy Now program on the taxpayer-subsidized radical-left Pacifica Radio network, host Amy Goodman devoted the whole show to lionizing late-term abortionist George Tiller, gunned down on Sunday in his church in Kansas. Tiller’s colleague Dr. Susan Robinson vehemently denounced pro-lifers for breaking all kinds of city ordinances for their use of city property, and she even compared their crosses to the Ku Klux Klan’s:

So, these anti-abortion protesters—and let’s not call them "pro-life." You know, they’re not pro-life; they’re anti-abortion. These anti-abortion protesters would come every morning. They had little kind of holder locations drilled in the grass in the easement between the sidewalk and the street, which is city property. And I don’t know how many, over a hundred, 150 or so, I would guess, and these are little receptacles where they would put crosses. And so, as the patients would drive up to the clinic, they’d be faced with this forest of crosses....

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper conducted a five-minute long interview of Diane Elder, a woman who decided to let her infant daughter live despite her severe genetic defects, during his program on Tuesday evening. The interview came about after Elder wrote Cooper after watching a similar interview he conducted the previous night of Lynda Waddington, a “pro-choice” blogger for the Huffington Post and RH Reality Check, who decided to have a late-term abortion herself (the anchor did not mention Waddington’s left-wing affiliations during the interview). (audio clips from the interview available here)

On Wednesday afternoon, the network’s “Situation Room” program played an extended clip from the interview, which followed an additional segment with a different parent whose twins were aborted late-term at the hands of murdered abortionist George Tiller. During this second interview, the father of the twins described how Tiller had the two babies “wrapped up in a baby’s blanket” and how the abortionist “baptized them.” Despite the two-to-one imbalance in the segments, CNN did at least try to balance the segments with the two supporters of late-term abortion with that of the interview of Elder.

During the interview with Cooper, Elder described her experiences during the four months after she found out that her daughter had Trisomy 18, a severe genetic disorder, and during the half-day that she shared with her daughter, whom she named Angela. Despite all the hardships that she and her family endured, Elder recounted how after her daughter was born, “we were very taken aback when we found that, when she was placed in our arms, we were happy. We were- we were incredibly happy. And my husband was with me. A lot of family and friends showed up right after the birth. She was passed around from arm to- from arms to arms.” Cooper dealt with the subject very sensitively, and thanked her for her strength at the end of the interview.

Keith Olbermann’s Fox News-hating frenzy on Monday night might have obscured the nasty accusations against pro-lifers Olbermann drew out of Richard Wolffe, who recently left his job as a political reporter at Newsweek to be a full-time MSNBC pundit.

Wolffe said Tiller’s killing had a "direct link" to people yelling "Kill him" at McCain-Palin rallies and insisted pro-lifers need to look themselves hard in the mirror and ask themselves "Have I played a part" in Tiller’s death by charging that Tiller "committed horrendous acts"?

Wolffe also insisted Republicans were hypocrites for objecting to "Muslim terrorism" while encouraging terrorism against abortion doctors, since that's a natural "result" of abortion protests:

OLBERMANN: The homeland security secretary, Ms. Napolitano, bowed to Republican outrage in April, apologizing for that DHS assessment that warned of violent acts by right-wing extremists - are the Republicans in Congress still of the belief that the threat of right-wing extremist violence is some sort of fantasy out of the Obama administration?

Wasn't it just a couple of days ago that the crew over at the Daily Kos was fretting about how conservatives as a whole are equally as complicit in the murder of George Tiller as the shooter himself?  And of the details being reported to better understand the background of the actual killer, Scott Roeder, doesn't one major detail involve the posts that he left on anti-abortion Web sites?

With that in mind, how concerned should we be with a blog post that fantasizes about the death of conservative columnist Michelle Malkin? 

In a posting titled ‘Michelle Malkin - The Book', an individual using the handle cousinavi, creates a story which refers to Malkin's husband in a derogatory manner more than once, and eventually fantasizes about her choking to death. 

Should this story, which appears to be written at a third grade level, be taken for what the ‘writer' intends - a ‘total work of fiction'?  Or should it be taken for what it really is, an attempt to get Kos readers to indulge in the ‘writer's' imagination, inciting equally provocative death fantasies about Malkin? 

Excerpts below the jump (Warning!  Offensive language, equally offensive to those with an education)...

In the very heart of the pro-life community, there is nothing they wanted less than another shooting of an abortionist. An unhinged vigilante's shooting of notorious Kansas late-term abortion "provider" George Tiller prompted an avalanche of press releases from pro-life groups denouncing the killing.

Why bother? Let's face it. The national media had zero interest in spotlighting a pro-life spokesman expressing horror, because let's face it, they don't believe it. Instead, as with ABC, they found anonymous citizens on the website Twitter saying "Oh, happy, day. Tiller the baby killer is dead." Another wrote, "God bless the gunman."

It was time for a barrage of liberal mudslinging. Keith Olbermann started his MSNBC program with these words: "A religious jihad by fundamentalist crusaders who believe that murder is justified, their acts of violence having the intended effect of changing behavior. Our fifth story on the Countdown: Not the Taliban, not Hamas, not al Qaeda."

CNN correspondent Carol Costello underscored the left-wing campaign of blame targeting pro-lifers in the wake of the murder of abortionist George Tiller during a segment on Tuesday’s “American Morning.” She stated on the one hand that “criminologists we talked  [to] would say it’s unlikely words alone could drive someone to kill, and until we know more about the accused killer, it’s best not to speculate,” but immediately added that “many anti-abortion groups are clearly on the defensive.” Costello also highlighted a sound bite by University of California, Berkeley professor and former Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney, who predicted that “they’re going to get a huge backlash against Right-to-Life. You’re going to get a lot of people now saying, see, those people are all crazy. They all advocate violence.”

Anchor John Roberts introduced Costello’s report: “We’ve seen it all too often- the emotionally-charged debate over abortion leading to violence. Police say the man suspected of gunning down Dr. George Tiller acted alone. But did anti-abortion rhetoric also play a role?” Come again? The murder of abortionists happens quite rarely. The CNN correspondent then went further in this line: “You know, there’s no doubt- Dr. George Tiller had become the public face of late-term abortions, procedures done in the second trimester, the kind of procedure that evoked extreme emotion in an already emotional debate. Some say a long vicious war of words hastened Tiller’s death. Others say it was the act of one unbalanced man.”

The New York Times has so far been relatively sedate in its coverage of the murder of George Tiller, who performed partial birth abortions in his Wichita, Kan., clinic, mostly sticking to facts and pointing out that pro-life activist group Operation Rescue has condemned the killing.

But media reporter Brian Stelter provided a platform for vitriolic left-wing accusations that Fox News host Bill O'Reilly was somehow responsible for Tiller's killing, in Tuesday's "Doctor's Killer, Some Say, Is Not Alone in the Blame."

That's a nice bit of weasel-wording in the headline, using "Some Say" instead of the more accurate "Leftist Bloggers Say." The text box read: "The critics of an abortion provider are being criticized themselves." (That's putting it mildly.)

Dr. George R. Tiller had many critics, but arguably the one with the highest profile was Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News Channel host. Mr. O'Reilly, a vocal opponent of abortion, often called him "Tiller the baby killer" for performing late-term abortions and said repeatedly that he had "blood on his hands."

National Public Radio’s reporting on the George Tiller murder was perfect on Monday – in shutting out pro-life voices wanting to express regret. Reports on Morning Edition and on All Things Considered from Kansas City-based reporter Frank Morris lined up Tiller’s friends, lawyers, and customers to praise him. Pro-lifers were dismissed in one sentence in the morning report: "Many of Tiller's most vociferous critics said of his death, only that they denounced the murder and were praying for his family." That doesn’t sound very vociferous.

The evening story blurred together peaceful protesters in Wichita with those who bombed the clinic and shot Tiller. The only anti-Tiller commentary was the Internet ravings of the accused murderer.

Here's a look at the Morning Edition transcript: