Truth and Tucson (Three)

(A series begun here)

First reports are always wrong - that old adage can't be repeated enough. In a previous installment we examined the role of several military veterans in the Tucson rampage. Those stories were revealed in reports filed several days after Jared Loughner's assault. Initial reports from the day of indicated he'd killed Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several other citizens attending her public appearance at a local supermarket. Reports of her death proved premature, but soon enough they were replaced by the following hasty narrative: An Afghan vet, driven over the edge by Sarah Palin's Tea Party political hate speech, had opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon. He hadn't acted alone, and at least one accomplice was still at large.

"Hasty" is the key word - "opened fire" and "weapon" are the only accurate portions of that description. Most everything you'd need to know to "understand" Jared Loughner was known within hours of the event - and none of it remotely pointed to "politics" - at least as a rational person would define the term, as motive. Still, national media reports the day of (and day after) the event looked less like what could be found with a one-minute Google search (links to Loughner's YouTube page and reviews of the bizarre videos there were also in my inbox within minutes of the first report revealing his name; links to descriptions by his friends of a guy who was anything but a conservative Tea Party military veteran followed shortly thereafter) and more like this example from that evening by the Associated Press:

A gunman nearly unloaded a semiautomatic weapon at a busy supermarket Saturday during a public gathering for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, wounding the Democrat and killing Arizona's chief federal judge and five others in an attempted assassination that left Americans questioning whether divisive politics had pushed the suspect over the edge.
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Giffords, 40, is a moderate Democrat who narrowly won re-election in November against a tea party candidate who sought to throw her from office over her support of the health care law.
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"For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action," Giffords said in an interview with MSNBC.
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During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords in November, Republican challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot a fully loaded M-16 rifle. Kelly is a former Marine who served in Iraq and was pictured on his website in military gear holding his automatic weapon and promoting the event.

Add another unstable veteran to the tale. He had nothing to do with it, of course - had that space been used to provide more descriptions of Loughner by his friends, or more details of the contents of his "Internet postings, including some that express convoluted observations about government" that conclusion would be obvious to any rational reader.

Glenn Reynolds - as usual - collected and presented links throughout the day of the shooting (start at the bottom of the page here and work up). "Sadly, I don't think most of them had to "descend" very far," was Reynolds ultimate take on national media outlets' coverage of Tucson. (Another example: CNN's use of a picture of someone else identified as Loughner.) His conclusion: "local media did better."

But unless you were in Tucson - or on the internet - you had no access to that local news. Among those relying on hours of "national news reports" that substituted rabid speculation for factual details was a Tucson resident making his way home from California:

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was leaving a sheriffs convention in Palm Springs, Calif., a week ago Saturday when he got word of a shooting just outside Tucson.

"Seven people shot. That's all we knew," he said.

"I just got angrier and angrier on my way back to Tucson," said Dupnik, a longtime family friend of Giffords' and her parents.

On the six-hour drive back, he heard more details on the radio. That it was at a town-hall meeting outside a supermarket. That U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot point-blank in the head and was clinging to life. That the gunman, young and possibly mentally unstable, kept firing and killing and wounding others before being tackled and disarmed.

He arrived at headquarters and about a half-hour later was standing before reporters to give a briefing. He started speaking about his friend, Giffords, and about his sadness and his shock. Then, he gave voice to his anger.

What Dupnik said next catapulted him into the national spotlight: The killer, he said, might have been influenced by ugly political rhetoric. He called it "vitriol." He blamed radio and television commentators.
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Dupnik, a registered Democrat, has won every election since his first in 1980. In 2008, he won with nearly 65 percent of the vote. His longevity as well as his political skill have made him a de facto leader among Pima County Democrats.

His own imagination might have fueled his fever pitch during that race against time (and evening news deadlines) to get home from his convention - but six hours of unrelenting assurances that Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers were trying to kill him and everyone like him could have contributed to his rage, too. One can almost sympathize with him if, by the end of the long ride, he was imagining Palin herself pointing one of those big Alaska Grizzly Bear guns at him from behind every cactus on the route.

And during those same six hours most every claim regarding Loughner, his background and motives were debunked. The irony that Dupnik was right to blame "radio" for whipping up a frenzy - but had opened fire on the wrong specific target - was lost on the sheriff himself. Delivered before his engine had cooled, his press conference statements came in time to be added as further confirmation to many of those same erroneous day-of-the-shooting reports that inspired him to fire them off in the first place. "When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government - the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," Dupnik declared. "And, unfortunately, Arizona has become sort of the capital, we have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

That assessment might have surprised combat veteran Dr Peter Rhee, who would later state that Tucson was "embarrassing and pathetic" to trauma surgeons "because violence is almost nonexistent... I know everyone in the country thinks World War III is going on in Arizona, but it's probably still the nicest place I can think of to live." (Part of the reason additional surgeons had to be re-routed from Afghanistan for this horrific event.)

Within 24 hours the remaining elements of the bogus narrative that emerged almost before Loughner's victims were on Rhee's operating table were acknowledged as such. Stars and Stripes ran a story debunking Loughner's "military veteran" status - though local news had it the day before. (Four days later Lopez would acknowledge that she'd "...wrongly reiterated some information told to me immediately prior to the interview that the suspect shooter in the Tucson attack was possibly a veteran of the war in Afghanistan." The Washington Post would simply overwrite their original reference to the claim.)

And that same Sunday morning saw Sheriff Dupnik on national TV assuring America that reports of other shooter(s) were also wrong - "There's no doubt [Loughner] acted alone." But even in the clear light of dawn, when it came to the last vitriolic shred of the Tucson shooting myth - the sheriff would bitterly cling to his guns.

More to follow.