YouTube screen grab of Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank in screengrab from YouTube.

In a pitiful column in the Washington Post, Dana Milbank outlines links between Glenn Beck’s on-air rants and the actions of a murderer and would-be murderer. Yet, Milbank says we should not blame Beck for his viewers’ actions. Fortunately, the legal team that will soon take Andrew Breitbart to task for his attack on Shirley Sherrod will likely bring real consequences for its actions to the right wing attack media. Will the corporate media then continue to hold them blameless?

Milbank begins his column dated Sunday in the Washington Post with the topic of Byron Williams, who engaged in a shootout with Oakland Police when they stopped him for erratic driving. It was subsequently learned that Williams was heavily armed and on his way into San Francisco:

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco late Saturday night with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the American Civil Liberties Union and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to "start a revolution" with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

What prompted such madness and how did Williams choose the obscure target of the Tides Foundation? MediaMatters for America has provided the evidence that Glenn Beck is virtually the only figure on television who has targeted Tides:

On Friday, I discussed the case of Byron Williams, who on July 18 was pulled over by police while reportedly on his way to "kill people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU" and engaged in a five to eight minute shootout with ten officers before being shot, capture, and hospitalized. I noted that the Tides Foundation is relatively obscure, and wrote that "the question the media should be asking is why he decided to target Tides."

I also pointed out that while we don’t know how Williams heard about Tides, Glenn Beck is virtually the only one on television talking about the organization, regularly bringing it into his conspiracy theories. Beck has mentioned the organization in at least 29 editions of his Fox News program, including twice the week before Williams’ shootout.

And yet, despite citing this same evidence on Williams’ motivation, Milbank puts this information into his brilliant head and produces this gem:

It’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show.

In a non sequitur to beat all non sequiturs, Milbank continues in next three sentences to tie Beck to another shooter who killed three policemen in Pittsburgh:

Yet Williams isn’t the only such character with a seeming affinity for the Fox News host. In April 2009, a man allegedly armed with an AK-47, a .22-caliber rifle and a handgun was charged with killing three cops in Pittsburgh. The Anti-Defamation League reported that the accused killer had, as part of a pattern of activities involving far-right conspiracy theories, posted a link on a neo-Nazi Web site to a video of Beck talking about the possibility that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was operating concentration camps in Wyoming.

If Milbank can see how Beck is inciting such mayhem, why on earth does he claim that it’s not fair to blame Beck for the violence he incites? Milbank even goes on to cite more suggestive language from Beck, including:

Beck has prophesied darkly to his millions of followers that we are reaching "a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out."

In absolving Beck of blame for his irresponsible incitement to violence, Milbank can only bring himself to end the column with an incredibly weak admonishment to Beck, merely advising Beck to "Stop encouraging them."

There is a ray of hope, however, that the right wing attack media may soon face real consequences for its irresponsible actions. Shirley Sherrod, who was quickly railroaded out of her USDA job when Andrew Breitbart posted a video edited to falsely portray Sherrod as racist, has announced her intention to sue Breitbart for monetary damages because "that is all right-wing capitalists understand." The right wing media have set themselves up for a tremendous fall in the Sherrod case. Sherrod’s attorney and long-time friend Faya Ora Rose Touré is a formidable civil rights attorney, having been part of the team that recently achieved a settlement of over a billion dollars on behalf of African American farmers from USDA.

When Sherrod and her legal team finish with Bretibart, the right wing attack media will finally learn that there are consequences for their actions. Perhaps then even such mental luminaries in the corporate media such as Dana Milbank will be able to understand the link between the actions of figures such as Beck and Breitbart and the consequences of those actions.