What if Your Business Model Leads to Murder?
Let’s say you work for Fox News, where the screamer Bill O’Reilly repeatedly pinpoints the whereabouts of one of the few doctors in the vast midwestern part of the country who provides late-term abortions, inflaming listeners by labeling this man “Dr. Killer,” and then an assassin shoots the doctor down in cold blood in his church.
Is there blood on your hands?
Of course not, you say, you have nothing to do with O’Reilly’s rants, you’re in marketing, say, or advertising, or even a non-related role in a separate content silo.
Are you sure?
Hate-mongering is in fact the business model behind the O’Reillys and Rush Limbaughs and their programming strategies. Hate and fear sell, everyone knows that. But most media executives feel at least a modicum of conscience in how they run their businesses. Most media outlets moderate extremists and seek to avoid inflaming the unstable and unbalanced who may easily become violent after listening to such drivel.
But not those aiding and abetting O’Reilly. They take home fat paychecks thanks to his rants, and they know it. Now, there has been a consequence. A person who by all accounts (except O’Reilly’s and others of his ilk) was a decent, church-going man who was devoted to his family, and provided his patients legal medical services, is dead. Such is the work, it can be argued, of a business model based on selling hate.
A somewhat-related controversy is simmering surrounding the senseless murder of a guard at the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Museum by a virulent anti-Semite, racist and Holocaust-denier.
In that case, Facebook is at the center of a lesser media storm as it continues to host a group calling itself Holohoax.
Shortly after the shooting, this group reportedly posted a cartoon mocking the killing of the 39-year-old guard. Despite ongoing pressure from those who are concerned that Holocaust-deniers are engaging in a hateful form of speech that might continue to encourage violence against Jews (and institutions, like the museum, that shed light on the history of persecution of the Jewish people), so far Facebook has not disabled the 40-member group’s platform.
This case differs from O’Reilly’s in a critical way, however. This is primarily a matter of free speech, even if that speech is disgusting, untrue, and potentially hateful and inflammatory. Presumably if the group starts naming specific individuals and institutions that should be attacked, a la O’Reilly, Facebook will disable it.
There are nuances here; I do not mean to imply that it is easy for someone at Facebook or Fox News to anticipate all of the ways that their programming or platform could help trigger events whereby innocent people lose their lives. Much like the way the murder of a Boston woman via the “erotic services” links on Craigslist recently hurt the online classifieds company. This stuff can happen, no matter how carefully companies try to be good citizens.
Craigslist has taken the responsible step of working with law enforcement agencies to try and prevent acts like the Boston murder from recurring. Facebook is trying to navigate a minefield, and the verdict is out on how it performs. But Fox News has done nothing to rein in O’Reilly.
Three companies; three business models; one with blood on its hands.
The seller of hate.
In addition to serving as a BNET Media analyst/blogger, David Weir is a veteran journalist and the author of several books. Weir is a co-founder and vice-president of the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as an editorial board member of The Nation.
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