Simon Maloy
Media Matters: The right-wing rage machine unloads a frenzy of race-baiting
July 16, 2010 7:58 pm ET
The summer months are typically when the quality of political discourse in this country reaches its yearly nadir. Washington tends to slow down from June to August, and people who hold moderate interest in the political process instead turn to barbecues and baseball games. As a consequence, the people who remain engaged are those who are more, let's say, passionate in their beliefs, and aren't going to let a little thing like "other things to do" get in the way of their political activism. Summer is also tough for political journalists who still have deadlines to meet, but much less material with which to work. As a consequence, we see stories that would ordinarily merit passing or no mention earn disproportionate coverage. Minor gaffes become "scandals," non-issues become "controversial," and the end result is that pretty much everyone gets angrier.
It's in this environment that the right-wing media thrive, practiced as they are in ginning up stories based on manufactured outrage and utter nonsense. And lately, they've all had one topic on their minds: race. Specifically the racism of black political figures, which they claim is nothing short of institutional policy in the Obama administration, and the racism of white tea partiers, which they claim doesn't exist.
And where else can one begin except with the ever-evolving, increasingly ridiculous New Black Panther Party "scandal," which revolves around the allegation -- and it's hard to believe that right-wingers actually profess to believe this -- that the Obama Justice Department dropped voter intimidation charges against members of this fringe hate group due to the administration's official policy of not pursuing cases in which the defendant is black and the victim is white. Is there evidence for any of this? No. Does the partisan GOP hack/former DOJ attorney making this allegation have any facts to support it? Not so much. But that's the story they're sticking to, and it has sparked a frenzy of race-baiting more explicit than any we've seen thus far during the Obama administration.
Fox News has, of course, been leading the charge, embarking on what Jonathan Chait calls "the most widespread and mainstream right-wing effort to exploit racial fears against Obama." Glenn Beck nonsensically claimed that the New Black Panthers "have ties to the White House" and flat-out accused the administration of tacitly endorsing the "race war" he sees coming down the pike. Perpetually outraged Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, the "straight news" driving force behind the bogus story, has been corrected on the facts more times than should be necessary, but continues to hype the story with wide-eyed indignation.
In some ways, that's to be expected from Fox News.
The danger is that, with not much else going on and the right-wing rage machine operating at high speed, the bogus story starts bleeding into the mainstream press. Kelly herself boasted that Fox News "dragged the media kicking and screaming" to the New Black Panther story, and already there have been overly credulous treatments of the non-scandal on CNN and in the pages of The Washington Post.
more...
http://mediamatters.org/columns/201007160049
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