CommonDreams.org‘s Sarah Lazare (12/16/15) quotes FAIR’s Jim Naureckas on CNN‘s latest Republican debate:
“Framing the problem of political violence as a struggle of ‘us’ against ‘ them,’ of creating a demonized other by stoking fear, is a tried and true strategy for building an audience,” Jim Naureckas, the editor of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting’s watchdog journal Extra!, told Common Dreams.
“The debates are seen not as a public service but as a money-making opportunity for the networks,” Naureckas added. “More than anything, they want high ratings.”
Common Dreams also quoted the FAIR editor’s response to debate moderator Hugh Hewitt asking Ben Carson whether he was “ruthless” enough to “kill innocent children by not the scores, but the hundreds and the thousands”:
“It’s horrifying to see our leading cable news network offering, as a litmus test for becoming president of United States, a willingness to kill thousands of innocent children,” Naureckas argued. “To equate that with toughness and seriousness about protecting the United States is a violent fantasy of the sort that motivates the people who carry out mass shootings.”
The piece concluded with Naureckas’ observations on what was left out of the debate:
In a debate on “national security,” Naureckas noted that the greatest dangers were completely absent from the discussion and questioning: right-wing and white-supremacist violence, which—a recent study shows—poses the biggest domestic threat.
“It’s as though we didn’t just have an attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. It’s as though there wasn’t just a racist murder of nine people in a church in Charleston in an effort to start a race war,” said Naureckas. “That kind of violence just disappears from the conversation. It’s all about who we should bomb abroad and who we can we keep out.”
For Ben Carson, to join the pacifist Seventh-day Adventist Church, he had to sign a baptismal certificate vowing to be a lifelong pacifist, “In honor of our Lord’s example.” And it was this kind of hypocrisy, Carson’s pro-war Republican position, that prompted the moderator to expose and strongly oppose the gross contradiction. And for the life of me, I don’t see how any rational person could think that the moderator approved of bombing children as a “litmus test for becoming president.”