When you repeatedly ask, order, cajole, and plead with strangers to burn down the local theater you can’t act surprised when someone actually strikes the match, and you can’t feign ignorance. In the case George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who has repeatedly been attacked over the years for performing late-term abortions, Bill O’Reilly, and several other FOX News pundits, labeled the man a baby killer and demanded he be stopped. And this past weekend he was. Tiller was shot while serving as an usher in his local church by a right-wing extremist in an action which FOX News has denied any involvement or complicity.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann decided he had finally had enough. The man who used turn a funny phrase in giving out the latest SportsCenter highlights stepped back from his own entertaining newsman pundit persona to lay the facts of the situation bare and call for an immediate calling on the carpet of FOX News for what he views as their contributing influence to the murder. In a rather Murrow-esque moment Olbermann called for the quarantine and boycott of FOX News and any businesses which supports them, or, as he sees it, their agenda. Whether or not people can support this position, or even take Olbermann seriously, who has been in his own heated public battle with FOX over the past few years, remains to be seen.