Thirty years ago, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh parked a truck packed with explosives next to Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The explosion murdered 168 people, including 15 small children at a day care center in the building. McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were arrested, tried and convicted; McVeigh was executed six years later, while Nichols was sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms in federal prison, the longest ever for an individual.
McVeigh was as far from the conservative mainstream as you can imagine — an evil madman who employed deadly violence to destroy innocent people. But the dastardly attack occurred only months after liberals suffered one of their worst-ever electoral defeats, losing the House of Representatives after 40 years of uninterrupted control. Democrats blamed what CBS’s Dan Rather (January 4, 1995) impugned as “openly politically partisan and sometimes racist radio” for their abrupt change in fortune.
So after the immediate shock of the bombing passed, liberal journalists began assigning blame to ordinary conservatives, hoping to blur the facts and discredit the competition.
It was a key talking point on the April 23 Sunday talk shows, just four days after the attack. “To what extent, if any, do you think the political rhetoric to which you just referred has helped cause a climate in which people could go in that direction? In other words, the rhetoric which says, not just against big government, or liberal government, or dishonest government, but ‘I’m against government, government is the enemy?’” ABC’s Sam Donaldson asked Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center on This Week with David Brinkley.
Over on CBS’s Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer invited invective from Democratic President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta: “There’s been a lot of anti-government rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act? Do they feed on that kind of rhetoric?”
On Fox News Sunday, the Washington Post’s Juan Williams joined the chorus: “It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, and you know, gone berserk....It’s the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the right-wing triumph over the agenda here in Washington.”
As if his allies in the media needed any further encouragement, Clinton himself chimed in the next day (April 24). Talking about mainstream conservative radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, the President smeared: “They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, violence is acceptable....It is time we all stood up and spoke against that kind of reckless speech and behavior.”
Clinton’s comments encouraged the liberal media to double down on their condemnations of conservatives. “Never do most of the radio hosts encourage outright violence, but the extent to which their attitudes may embolden and encourage some extremists has clearly become an issue,” NBC’s Bryant Gumbel smarmily insisted the next day (April 25) on Today.
“The bombing shows how dangerous it really is to inflame twisted minds with statements that suggest political opponents are enemies,” the Washington Post’s David Broder agreed in a column published that same day.
Elsewhere in the same paper, readers saw this from columnist Carl Rowan: “Unless [Speaker of the House Newt] Gingrich and [Senate Majority Leader Bob] Dole and the Republicans say ‘Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?,’ you know we’re going to have some more events. I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles...creates a climate of violence in America.”
“Public antagonism toward government has been one of the principal themes of American political discourse for nearly two decades, growing in shrillness in the past year. This sentiment has been voiced and amplified by the new Republican House,” the Boston Globe’s David Shribman scolded in an April 25 news analysis. “But now that an attack on a government building has left scores dead, including children, the allure is coming off the anti-government rhetoric.”
A day later, the Los Angeles Times’s Nina Easton caught up to the pack: “The Oklahoma City attack on federal workers and their children also alters the once-easy dynamic between charismatic talk show host and adoring audience. Hosts who routinely espouse the same anti-government themes as the militia movement now must walk a fine line between inspiring their audience — and inciting the most radical among them.”
“Who has played the politics of paranoia better in this country in the last twenty or thirty years? Answer? Republican Party,” Newsweek’s Evan Thomas blasted on the April 29 edition of the weekend talk show Inside Washington. “Politically, starting with Richard Nixon in 1968, the Republicans have very skillfully exploited fear.”
“If the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing really view government as the people’s enemy, the burden of fostering that delusion is borne not just by the nut cases who preach conspiracy but also to some extent by those who erode faith in our governance in the pursuit of their own ambitions,” Time’s Michael Kramer denounced in the magazine’s May 1 edition.
The following week, his colleague Richard Lacayo wrote the magazine’s cover story “How Dangerous Are They? An Inside Look at America’s Antigovernment Zealots.” Lacayo targeted Republicans and conservatives: “In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the ’90s is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator in the blast.”
The nasty name-calling had its intended effect. Just one day before the bombing (April 18), Clinton was asked at a prime time press conference about being ignored amid the attention showered on congressional conservatives: “Do you worry about making sure that your voice is heard in the coming months?” The President defensively answered: “The Constitution gives me relevance.”
By mid-May, the tables had turned. “Bombing Helps Clinton Approval Rating Rise to 56%,” one headline screamed.
It wasn’t “the bombing,” of course. It was a nasty and cynical campaign waged by Democrats and their loyalists in the media to blame the President’s political adversaries for a horrific crime of which they were entirely innocent.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
