Annie
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- Nov 22, 2003
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It's me, not by any stretch of the imagination a 'racist'. Thought this was interesting though. WJ and others might be wrong on many things, IMHO, but not the MSM and being PC enough to bend over:
http://www.brendanloy.com/2006/02/naacp-chairman-is-bigoted-idiot-and.html
http://www.brendanloy.com/2006/02/naacp-chairman-is-bigoted-idiot-and.html
The NAACP chairman is a bigoted idiot, and the media doesn't care
# 2/03/2006 03:05:00 PM EST
Posted by Brendan
Okay, here's a question for you. If the chairman of the NAACP were to equate Republicans with Nazis, compare conservative judges to the Taliban, and call Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell "tokens," that would be pretty newsworthy, don't you think?
Now, what would you say if I told you that it happened, during a speech Wednesday by Julian Bond at Fayetteville State University, and yet the "journalists" who covered the event for the Fayetteville Observer and News 14 Carolina apparently felt his incendiary remarks weren't worthy of mention in their stories about the event?! Instead, they wrote blandly positive puff pieces about Bond's speech, discussing such earth-shattering breaking news as the importance of Black History Month and how "the fight for equal rights is not over."
Pretty incredible, huh? My expectations of the MSM are fairly low these days, but the lack of news judgment here is really astounding.
The only site to report on Bond's controversial remarks -- which were, obviously, the most significant actual news that came out of his speech, not the warmed-over b.s. that everybody else reported on -- was the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. Now, I have said before that anything reported by WND should be taken with several grains of salt, but in this case, it's the mainstream media, not the right-wing rag, that is being inexcusably dishonest, leaving out obviously newsworthy information that makes a liberal organiziation look bad (more on that in a moment).
How do I know WND isn't simply lying? Well, although they're undeniably very ideological, I seriously doubt they would simply make sh*t up... but I did wonder where they got this information, as I doubt they had a reporter at the speech. Who was their source, and how reliable is he/she? So I held off from blogging about this story yesterday until I could find some independent verification. And, hey, looky here: it turns out Julian Bond made virtually identical remarks during a speech at the College of William & Mary on January 19, and the college's online newspaper, the DoG Street Journal, reported on it -- albeit in the next-to-last paragraph, in a rebuttal quote from the College Republicans:
"I think Mr. Bond's over-the-top rhetoric speaks for itself. It is unfortunate that Mr. Bond resorted to name-calling and insults, calling Republicans and the Bush administration the Taliban and associating them with the Nazi swastika. It is telling that when an audience member asked Mr. Bond how he would deal with terrorism, he could not come up with an answer. Perhaps he is so busy calling Americans members of the Taliban that he forgets about the real danger of actual terrorists. President Bush continues to work to defend America in a war against the most evil terrorists at home and abroad, while fighting to increase the well being of Americans," commented Ben Locher, Chairman of the College Republicans.Now, look, I don't want to sound like I'm claiming that there is some grand, deliberate liberal-media conspiracy at work here. For the most part (much like I told Spike Lee about government's Katrina failures), this is an issue of incompetence, not malice. Clearly, the reporters who covered these speeches for the local newspapers and TV stations are simply bad journalists. No good journalist, liberal or conservative, would ever listen to such a prominent national figure make such obviously controversial remarks and not report on it.
The official William & Mary press release also confirms that Bond made the "Taliban" comment. But again, incredibly, the local media coverage of Bond's appearance made no mention whatsoever of his incendiary comments. The Hampton Roads Daily Press says Bond "slammed the Bush administration Thursday, criticizing President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina and speaking against Judge Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court," but there is no reference to his Taliban and Nazi remarks, which are obviously more newsworthy than any of that other typical, run-of-the-mill criticism.
The problem, unfortunately, is that there are a lot of bad journalists in this country, especially (though not exclusively) at local newspapers and local TV stations, which is where an awful lot of people get their news. And a bad journalist, one who doesn't know how to properly prioritize information based on newsworthiness when composing a story, will tend naturally to emphasize the parts of the story that are the most interesting or appealing to him or her personally, in accordance with his or her worldview. That's only natural; it's how the rest of us tell stories about things we witnessed, and it takes good journalistic sense (and/or training) to learn how to do it differently, organizing stories based on objective newsworthiness instead of personal whims. Too few journalists have either the good sense or the good training, so they subconsciously allow their personal worldview to take the wheel -- and as countless studies have proven, the vast majority of journalists have a more liberal worldview. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how liberal media bias is born.
Most bad journalists with liberal worldviews probably wouldn't agree with Bond's incendiary remarks, but they wouldn't be particularly outraged, either, so -- because bad journalists don't realize that such remarks are objectively newsworthy -- they get left out of the story, in favor of boring, warmed-over, left-wing dogma that appeals to the journalist's sensibilities. Whereas if a bad journalist with a liberal worldview was reporting on a speech by Pat Robertson, you can be damn sure that any outrageous or incendiary remarks Robertson might make (and that's pretty much a daily occurrence with him) would be prominently featured in the story, not out of willful bias, but because the bad journalist would be personally outraged and thus would consider that aspect of the story far more interesting than whatever boring, warmed-over, right-wing dogma Robertson was spewing in the rest of the speech. The bad journalist accidentally gets the Robertson story roughly right, but gets the Bond story completely wrong, creating a distinct ideological skew if you place the stories side-by-side.
The end result? Far too often, and far more often than their conservative counterparts, liberal bigots like Julian Bond can make utterly outrageous remarks to friendly audiences -- repeatedly! -- and get away with it because it doesn't get reported in the press. Or rather, they could get away with it... but not anymore, thanks to conservative sites like WND and the Drudge Report (which prominently linked to WND's story yesterday). Is it any wonder that these sites emerged as conservative "alternatives" to the dominant MSM? I'm not saying that Matt Drudge or Joseph Farah are paradigms of virtue or truth, but as much as our resident liberals love to hate them, this story aptly demonstrates that there was indeed a need for a conservative voice to counter the dominant journalistic paradigm. (A better solution would be better journalists, of whatever ideology, but alas, that's a distant dream.)
Google News searches reveal that, at present, the Julian Bond story is still confined to right-wing news sites and blogs, and press releases from conservative organizations (see here and here). The lack of MSM attention is telling. Again: if the person making similarly outrageous remarks were Pat Robertson or some other prominent conservative, lazy, bad-journalist news editors at outlets around the country who cull the wires for stories would have picked it up by now. But this story doesn't appeal to them, because it doesn't comport with their worldview, so they're not predisposed to notice it or grasp its significance.
If WND, Drudge and the blogosphere hype this story enough, it may eventually break into the mainstream national media, perhaps even in a big way. Drudge, in particular, wields a great deal of power when it comes to setting the media's agenda, especially now that the conservative Fox News is around to get the ball rolling. The blogosphere's power is growing, as well. But an eventual MSM newsburst on this issue won't disprove my point. If this story does gain traction in the MSM -- and it certainly should -- it's only because of the conservative "fringe" media which reported it in the first place, and the conservative megaphone Drudge who broadcasted it to the masses, and the (largely) conservative blogosphere which amplified it. Again, this is precisely why these "alternative" news outlets have come into existence in the first place: if they weren't there, no one would be reporting on this story.
Having babbled on and on with my media critique, I suppose I should say a little more about Bond's remarks. First, here's the relevant excerpt from the WND story:
Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as "tokens."
"The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side," he charged. ...
He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush's judicial nominees to the Taliban.
The article also notes that in July 2001, Bond said,"[Bush] has selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection."
It should go without saying -- though I fear it may not for some of my more stridently anti-Bush readers, but I hope I'm wrong -- that calling successful black Republicans "tokens" is blantanly racist (as well as anti-Republican to a point that transcends political disagreement and becomes its own form of sheer bigotry), saying the GOP is the party of the swastika is an utterly outrageous statement that has no place in civilized debate (in large part because it degrades the true evil of the Nazis), and talking about "Taliban" judicial nominees or "Taliban" religious conservatives (at least, in anything outside of a joking context) is not only a ridiculous exaggeration, but is almost as offensive as the Nazi comment, considering the awful crimes against women, and the Afghan people generally, that were committed by that heinous regime. (Not to mention the whole, supporting terrorism against America and the West thing.)
Unless they were not merely "taken out of context" (always the first line of defense of those who say stupid things) but actually misquoted, none of Bond's trio of incendiary comments are remotely defensible, and he should be relieved of his duties immediately by the NAACP.
Unfortunately, it's clear that Bond has been saying things like this for a while, and nobody on the Left or in the NAACP leadership seems to mind much. Moreover, the relative lack of liberal outrage directed toward equally outrageous comments by Howard "Republicans are evil" Dean and others demonstrates a general willingness to tolerate -- nay, be led by -- these bozos, which is an extremely sad testament to the state of affairs on the Left, and the main reason why I find myself feeling more and more uncomfortable with the label "Democrat" with each passing day.
Otherwise fair-minded liberals who tolerate remarks like Bond's without complaint need to pay more attention to the classic bumper-sticker that is so often found alongside sundry anti-Bush stickers on the cars of left-thinking folks: "If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
Seriously, liberals: Cast off these morons! Rebel against them! Bring sanity back to the Left! WE NEED YOU! America needs a strong, vibrant, rational Left! It does not need the sort of bullcrap that Bond is spewing. Without a viable opposition, the worst tendencies of the Right will come ever more to the forefront. Save America -- fire Julian Bond!
The repugnant views of Julian Bond and his ilk are a cancer on the Left, a cancer on the Democratic Party and cancer on the country. They must be taken on and defeated. (And if we don't defeat them, the Republicans will keep defeating us.)
P.S. I composed this whole post before seeing this Opinion Journal piece, which makes basically the same point, and quotes the same two local news sources. I'm glad to see that James Taranto is as intimately familiar with Google News as I am.
Taranto writes:
Isn't it newsworthy when the leader of a venerable organization like the NAACP engages in such over-the-top, crackpot rhetoric? (Or, if you're an over-the-top crackpot and think Bond was right, isn't it newsworthy that the leader of a venerable organization like the NAACP is telling the truth about the evil Chimpy W. Hitliar?)
Why did the local media ignore Bond's crazy talk? (The speech doesn't seem to have received any national attention outside WND and cable chat shows.) The most likely explanation, it seems to us, is that they recognized the talk as crazy and felt it would be invidious, inflammatory or both to depict a respected black leader as crazy--even though doing so would have been merely a matter of quoting his own words. [I think it's a bit less deliberate than that, as I said above, but the result is the same either way. -ed.]
What we end up with, then, is a double message, very much like Yasser Arafat talking peace in English while inciting hatred in Arabic--except that in this case Bond is speaking a language everyone understands, and reporters, whose job is to report the facts, are instead concealing them. Bond's mostly black audience at Fayetteville hears his message of division and resentment, while the broader public is told that he has a "positive attitude" and is engaged in a "fight for equal rights."
And then people scratch their heads and try to figure out why blacks' political attitudes are so different from those of nonblacks.
(Hat tip: Blogger News Network.)
P.P.S. Welcome, InstaPundit readers, to BrendanLoy.com, home of the Irish Trojan! If you recognize my name but can't quite place it... I'm that Katrina guy.
One point I want to add... I'm not so naive as to think that deliberate ideological skewing never happens in the media. Of course it does -- in both directions, but moreso in the liberal direction for the simple reason that there are more liberals in the media. (As an aside, ideological skewing is pretty much fine by me, so long as you're honest and up-front about it. It's when you pretend to be "fair and balanced" when you're not, or to publish "all the news that's fit to print" when you're really being quite ideologically selective about the meaning of the word "fit," that I have a problem with you.) However, I think that most of what is commonly described as "liberal bias" is less the result of deliberate ideological skewing and more the result of the unconscious biases of bad, lazy journalists.
It is also true that the "bad journalist bias" can sometimes benefit conservatives. For example, lazy journalists are more likely to accept a government pronouncement instead of vigorously questioning it, so when Republicans are in power, this can help them. Also, as Glenn notes, a very similar phenomenon to what is now occurring with Julian Bond happened with Trent Lott made his infamous comments about Strom Thurmond. It took sustained, conservative blogospheric outrage to get that story on the front pages, even though Lott is himself a conservative. I think the initial failure of journalists to report what they saw and heard in that instance owed to a bad-journalist laziness similar to what we're seeing here, combined with an unseemly chumminess with the Washington elite that causes some reporters to take off their "serious journalist" hats when they're at a D.C. social function like that one. But that's just a guess. Either way, the point is that these things can go either way -- but the phenomenon I'm decscribing is much more likely, in the aggregate, to benefit liberals rather than conservatives. (Of course, in the long run, failing to expose the bigotry of men like Julian Bond doesn't really "benefit" liberals at all. But you know what I mean.)
