Pima County Sher­iff Clarence Dup­nik at the post-​​shooting press con­fer­ence. Source: AP.

Pima County Sher­iff Clarence Dupnik’s widely-​​reported obser­va­tion that hate speech was par­tially respon­si­ble for the shoot­ing of Rep. Gabrielle Gif­fords (D-​​AZ) has prompted sev­eral heated dis­cus­sions on this blog, as well as other venues.

Let me say one thing, because peo­ple tend to pooh-​​pooh this busi­ness about all the vit­riol that we hear inflam­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic by peo­ple who make a liv­ing off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not with­out consequences.

Paul Krug­man took this fur­ther:

Where’s that toxic rhetoric com­ing from? Let’s not make a false pre­tense of bal­ance: it’s com­ing, over­whelm­ingly, from the right. It’s hard to imag­ine a Demo­c­ra­tic mem­ber of Con­gress urg­ing con­stituents to be “armed and dan­ger­ous” with­out being ostra­cized; but Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Michele Bach­mann, who did just that, is a ris­ing star in the G.O.P.

And there’s a huge con­trast in the media. Lis­ten to Rachel Mad­dow or Keith Olber­mann, and you’ll hear a lot of caus­tic remarks and mock­ery aimed at Repub­li­cans. But you won’t hear jokes about shoot­ing gov­ern­ment offi­cials or behead­ing a jour­nal­ist at The Wash­ing­ton Post. Lis­ten to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will.

On this blog and else­where, the dis­cus­sion devolved into a pre­dictable round of tu quoque, where com­menters who iden­ti­fied them­selves as con­ser­v­a­tive accused the left of just as much out­rage speech as the right.

For exam­ple, con­ser­v­a­tive blog­ger Barry Secrest fired back:

The [Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity] report [cited by Krug­man] “typ­i­cally” failed to take into account the fact that vir­tu­ally every ter­ror­ist attack and instance of extreme vio­lence per­pe­trated had been repeat­edly admin­is­tered by denizens of the Left, to include the author­i­tar­ian Jihadists and a now deranged envi­ron­men­tal­ist wackoism.

He then pro­ceeded to list, in some detail, Pres­i­dent Obama’s alleged out­rage speech includ­ing “calls for vio­lence.” Do the read­ers of this blog see any exam­ples of out­rage speech in the exam­ples cited in Secrest’s blog? Res ipsa loquitur.

Blog­ger Vyan at Daily Kos then listed exam­ples of alleged calls for vio­lence on Fox News, and doc­u­mented their out­rage at Krugman’s column.

The con­nec­tion between “out­rage speech” and vio­lence may be ten­ta­tive, at best. One aspect of the phe­nom­e­non that’s amenable to analy­sis, how­ever, is whether the right does it more than the left, or whether they are equally culpable.

Keith Olber­mann. Source: HuffPo.

This ques­tion was approached by Tufts Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors Sarah Sobieraj and Jef­frey Barry in an arti­cle titled “From Inci­vil­ity to Out­rage: Polit­i­cal Dis­course in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News,” and pub­lished in the Feb­ru­ary, 2011, issue of the peer-​​reviewed jour­nal Polit­i­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tion. (Because of the extended lead time between the sub­mis­sion and pub­li­ca­tion of research find­ings, we can be sure that this study was ini­ti­ated well before the cur­rent con­tro­versy. The data were gath­ered in the spring of 2009.)

The vari­ables mea­sured by the Tufts researchers were:

  • insult­ing language
  • name call­ing
  • mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tive exaggeration

Glenn Beck. Source: New York Times.

Amaz­ingly, 100% of evening cable TV shows, 98.8% of talk radio pro­grams and 82.8% of blog posts con­tained exam­ples of what the researchers call “out­rage speech.” They noted some cases where the inci­dents of out­rage occurred at a rate of more than one per minute.

Is one side of the polit­i­cal debate more likely to engage in out­rage speech than the other? Yes, and by a wide mar­gin. From the article:

Our data indi­cate that the right uses decid­edly more out­rage speech than the left. Taken as a whole, lib­eral con­tent is quite nasty in char­ac­ter, fol­low­ing the out­rage model of emo­tional, dra­matic and judgment-​​laden speech. Con­ser­v­a­tives, how­ever, are even nastier.

The data showed the polit­i­cal right engag­ing in an aver­age of 15.57 out­rage acts per case, while the left engaged in 10.32 acts per case.

So, while there is plenty of blame to go around, and a gen­eral reduc­tion in polit­i­cal out­rage speech might leave both sides with much less to say, this study makes it clear that the out­rage speech on the right is more preva­lent than on the left.

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