A comment in this earlier thread is well worth repeating here:
The other night I was watching Connect with Mark Kelley on CBC.
They pulled out the old Sarah Palin target map and talked about the
heightened rhetoric…days after the shooting. I thought it was too much
so I e-mailed the show with my concerns…
To his credit he replied back to me directly…
—-
Thanks for the email. Blaming us for politicising the shooting is rich.
Have you followed anything that has happened in Arizona in the past
year? I don’t blame anyone but Loughner for the shooting. And no one has
said he is a Tea Partier on our show. But the Republicans own candidate-
a Tea Partier- was abandoned by the GOP because of his views. There’s a
context worth mining in Arizona- and to discuss it makes me a lefty?
Have we met?
As for your snide remarks about the technical problems, our system
crashed. Stuff happens. We don’t practice, nor preach perfection. We
just try our best. Maybe that approach reflects my own naivete.
Cheers
MKelley
Posted by: Jeff at January 13, 2011 2:22 PM
A huge problem for folks on the Left, even the Centre Left where Mark Kelley arguably sits politically, is their complete lack of self-awareness of the bias in their own views. Combine this predilection with someone who is a “journalist” and you have an individual who is convinced that they have no bias whatsoever. It’s a delusion, of course, because each & every one of us is chock full of different biases.
I have little doubt that Kelley writes off commenter Jeff and probably most every SDA regular as “right wing extremists”. But just imagine for a moment how he would view a situation if a conservative had been killed in Tucson and someone had pointed out that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had displayed a map with bullseyes across it. Oh wait, a conservative judge was killed and the DNC did display such a map! But drawing a connection there would be much too ridiculous according to the “enlightened” mind that is Mark Kelley.
And lest we forget, your tax dollars are paying his salary. đ
Update: Some have suggested that it’s unfair to publish Mark Kelley’s response without also posting the initial e-mail from Jeff. He has kindly sent it to me and here it is in full:
Dear Connect Folks,
Three days after a horrible shooting you’re still going on about the conservative rhetoric stuff?
Sarah Palin’s map? Feel free to read this link…http://www.verumserum.com/?p=13647
The jury is pretty much in about Jared as well.
Communist Manifesto…favourite YouTube video is a guy in a mask burning an American flag…backyard skull ceremony…friends indentify him as liberal (http://punditpress.blogspot.com/2011/01/friend-of-loughner-confirms-he-is.html)
This is hardly a Tea Party type dude.
I thought it was in poor taste to go down the road of politicizing a shooting rampage, but I suppose that’s a reflection of my naivete.
I don’t remember the same level of journalistic political investigation during the Fort Hood shootings and I doubt I have to get into explanations for why.
Anyway, we all have a bias, but the leftward bent is starting to be a bit much. Especially when it comes to horrible incidents like this shooting.
Best,
Jeff
P.S- The technical difficulties are pretty amateur hour for a national show. I worked on a local cable talk show in Regina that was mostly staffed with volunteers and we could make a show run smoother.