(cc photo: Tony Crider)
This week on CounterSpin: Many, many Americans are shocked and saddened by the horror of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the violence and hatred it represented, even before the beating of Deandree Harris and the murder of Heather Heyer. And saddened, if perhaps less shocked, to have a president who can’t bring himself to denounce it. Whether it does more than shock and sadden will depend in part on the quality of the conversations we have about it—and that has something to do with media. How capable and how willing can we expect them to be, of examining the role of US institutions, including their own, in what happened in Charlottesville—what led to it, what could lead away from it?
We’ll talk first with FAIR analyst Adam Johnson, host of the podcast Citations Needed, about media coverage so far.
Transcript: Media’s First Instinct is to Strip Ideology from the Conversation
(cc photo Peter Kaminski)
And then: You’re hearing a lot of evocation of US history, but some of the most common presentations—of the Confederacy, of white supremacy—are not merely inadequate, but perversely twisted. Maybe because so few of the voices you hear are actual historians. Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent historian, author of the book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. We’ll talk with her about her recent article, “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump.”
Transcript: The Confederacy Was Brought About by a Small Class of Wealthy Slaveholders
First, we take a very quick look at the New York Times misrepresenting the US role in the 2009 Honduras coup.
Source Links:
- “For Media, Driving Into a Crowd of Protesters Is a ‘Clash,’” by Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 8/12/17)
- “Centrist Pundits Paved Way for Trump’s ‘Alt-Left’ False Equivalence,” by Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 8/16/17)
- “White Supremacy in the Age of Trump,” by Keri Leigh Merritt (BillMoyers.com, 8/8/17)
- “Charlottesville and the Confederate Legacy,” by Keri Leigh Merritt (BillMoyers.com, 8/17/17)
Well, the American Revolution was brought about by the same small class of wealthy people who never care about the poor white people once the fighting was over.