Gunman opens fire at Discovery Channel headquarters

John Cook

An armed man entered the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., this afternoon and opened fire, according to news reports. MSNBC is reporting that the man was wearing a vest with cylinders attached that appeared to be explosives. The office building houses more than 1,000 staffers for Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, and a variety of other cable networks. MSNBC is reporting that at least one, or perhaps two, hostages have been taken.

UPDATE: The Silver Spring police department just described the suspect as an Asian male. He is in contact with the police, and has an unspecified grievance with Discovery Communications.

SECOND UPDATE: MSNBC, citing law enforcement sources, is identifying the suspect as James J. Lee, an environmental activist with a long history of complaints against the Discovery Channel. Lee's web site, www.savetheplanetprotest.com, currently resolves to a bizarre list of demands that seems to blame the Discovery Channel for a wide variety of environmental problems. The demands includes "daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's 'My Ishmael'," a 1992 environmental novel that purported to show that humans do not have primacy over other creatures on the planet. For more than two years, Lee has pursued complaints against Discovery based on the premise that the network's programming is somehow to blame for environmental degradation. The photo at right comes from the web archives of Lee's web site.

Beginning in 2008, Lee seems to have become obsessed with the idea that the Discovery Channel's programming is insufficiently environmentally radical. He launched a series of protests against the network; the rationale, as he explained in promotional text found in an archive of his web site, was that "The Discovery Channel produces a lot of shows about saving the planet that all have one thing in common: They don't work. Why don't they have REAL shows about SAVING THE PLANET? Have you ever noticed the crap they have on their network about just about everything else but that?"

In March 2008, in an effort to attract fellow protesters, Lee threw $1,000 in cash into the air in front of Discovery's headquarters, a stunt that prompted his arrest. It wasn't the first time he tried to use cash to raise awareness for his particular view of environmentalism: In July 2008, he announced on his web site about a contest for "$200,000 worth of commercial real estate property in Hawaii plus $10,000 in cash for the best TV show idea to save the planet." He submitted his own idea for such a show to Discovery; he described is as a reality show "where contestants would come from all over to compete with each other and come up with ideas to save the planet." His treatment makes it sound like a version of "American Idol" where you replace the singers with environmentalists, the songs with ideas about green innovation, and Simon Cowll et. al. with a panel of blunt scientists. It was presumably not picked up.

Lee seems to be an admirer of Daniel Quinn, a novelist and leader of the "new tribalist" movement, which argues that civilization is failing and that people should organize themselves into smaller, ecologically sustainable units. Quinn is known for arguing that food aid from western nations contributes to overpopulation and should be severely curtailed, even if it results in widespread famine.

Lee also launched a web site called Antiforeclosurearmy.com--the site is registered to the same address as Lee's other site---which argued that the solution to unemployment was a reduction in rent and mortgage payments. The site features this web video which appears to have been created by Lee:

Here is a Facebook page associated with Antiforeclosurearmy.com that appears to be Lee's. And here is a Twitter account associated with the site that also seems to belong to Lee. Sample post: "The one way to stop future unemployment is for everyone to stop breeding babies. Those babies will grow up to displace you."