Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax has its story on Arizona shooter Jared Loughner, and it's sticking to it. Two more Newsmax articles persist in incompletely reporting the contents of Loughner's book list.
Davd Patten and Kathleen Walter wrote in a Jan. 10 article that "Loughner’s bizarre rants mention Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but do not mention Palin, Fox News, the Tea Party, or other high profile conservatives such as host Glenn Beck or Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C." In the attached video interview, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell said that Loughner "isn't even a conservative. We now know he's some kind of anarchist who liked the Communist Manifesto."
Another Jan. 10 article by Patten, inveighing against the "backlash mounted against media outlets who blamed the shooting on inflammatory right-wing rhetoric," similiarly stated that "His online rants appeared to reflect a muddled, possibly left-wing viewpoint that embrace anarchy. Intellectually, his influences appeared to range from Karl Marx to Hitler’s Mein Kampf."
As it did the day before, Newsmax failed to note the books on Loughner's list that contradicted its notion that he is a liberal: anti-totalitarian tomes like "Animal Farm," "Farenheit 451," and Ayn Rand's "We the Living."
Of course, as Salon.com pointed out, the presence of such contradictory books -- not to mention two books by the Greek philosopher Plato -- on Loughner's reading list suggest that perhaps he's just a crazy person and people shouldn't be trying to divine significance where there is none:
But Loughner is almost certainly insane and, like the countless other mentally disturbed people who send similar ravings to media outlets around the world, his ideas would have been ignored as incoherent and irrelevant if he hadn't fired a gun into a crowd of people Saturday. The fact that he did fire that gun, however, doesn't make his delusions suddenly meaningful. It doesn't make his list of favorite books significant. Crazy people who make headlines and change history are still crazy.
By studying Loughner's book list for clues to the political leanings that somehow "drove" him to commit murder, commentators are behaving a lot like crazy people themselves.
But Newsmax, like WorldNetDaily, is too wedded to the narrative of trying to paint Loughner as a liberal that the facts don't matter -- and neither does logic.
