Alex Wagner puts together a hatchet job on Alex Jones in which she associates Alex Jones with (in her words) hate speech, far right-wing conspiracy theorists, radical libertarians, and fringe arch-conservative deeply racist persons out for crazy profits.
She blames Infowars for influencing Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarmaev. She makes an accusation and charge of a possible motivation relating to Jones that is highly biased. She explicitly downgrades the jihadist religious motivation and upgrades an Alex Jones motivation. The basis of any such comment whatever is an interview given by Tsarmaev’s brother-in-law to AP. He commented in passing that Tsarmaev visited the Infowars site. However, the deep focus of the interview is a stranger named Misha who influenced Tsarnaev. The article begins
“In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.”
What Wagner has done is, with intent, smeared Jones, attempted to lower his reputation by accusing him of being out for crazy profits, and associated him with racism, violence, hatred and extremism. I say that it’s with intent because she has obviously constructed this piece carefully. She has brought in other commenters who help her do the hatchet work, such as Alex Seitz-Wald, who conflates such terms as anti-government, conspiracism, radicalisms and deep distrust of the government. She also brings in Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Wagner directly connects “radical libertarian agenda” to “Southern racist post-neo-Confederate attitude”, in what has become a sort of standard, albeit false, anti-libertarian slur. Potok ties the emergence of this to racism via the rise of Barack Obama.
By doing this piece, Wagner has seriously damaged her standing, at whatever level it may have stood, as “journalist”, “analyst” and “political analyst”. How can her work be trusted if she goes so far as to slander Alex Jones in this way?
1:49 pm on August 17, 2013
