It Takes an Activist to Bring Up ‘Superpredators’
At a private fundraiser in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 24, Black Lives Matter activist Ashley Williams confronted Hillary Clinton about a 1996 speech (Buzzfeed, 5/8/15) in which she promised “an organized effort against gangs”:
They are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators. No conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.
“Superpredators” was a buzzword introduced by conservative criminologist John DiIulio in the Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard (11/27/95). The term was intrinsically racist; DiIulio’s main evidence that “Americans are sitting atop a demographic crime bomb” was that by 2005, the number of teenage boys would rise “about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks.”
Yet in a campaign in which criminal justice issues have been in the forefront (thanks to Black Lives Matter), and media constantly refer to African-Americans as Clinton’s “firewall” against the insurgent campaign of Bernie Sanders, virtually no one in media referred to Clinton’s invocation of this eugenic slur before Williams interjected it (FAIR Blog, 2/27/16). “You know what, nobody’s ever asked me before,” Clinton told her before going back to her prepared speech—unintentionally indicting the political press corps.
Ho-Hum: Painting Dramatic Upsets as Predictable
The New York Times (3/2/16) summed up Bernie Sanders’ Super Tuesday performance: “Wins for Sanders in Liberal Strongholds.” Actually, one of Sanders’ four Super Tuesday victories was in Oklahoma, which hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964; another was in Colorado, a solidly purple state that voted for Obama twice and for George W. Bush twice.
In the accompanying story, reporters Patrick Healy and Amy Chozick wrote: “Mrs. Clinton succeeded in containing Mr. Sanders to states he was expected to win, like Vermont and Oklahoma.” In fact, the polling website 538 gave Hillary Clinton a very slight edge in Oklahoma; Sanders’ 10-point win there was unexpected. The last poll listed by Real Clear Politics (Quinnipiac, 11/11-15/15) had Clinton up by 28 percentage points in Colorado, which she actually lost by 19 points; the most recent Minnesota poll (Star Tribune, 1/25/16) had Clinton 34 points ahead—whereas actual
caucus-goers there picked Sanders by 24 points.
‘Balance’ = ‘Conservative Majority’
On CNN‘s State of the Union (2/14/16), Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward laid out the “potential minefield” posed by a liberal Supreme Court appointment to “everyone, including Hillary Clinton and the Obama White House.”
Because Scalia was a conservative, said Woodward, the Democrats will say, “Gee, we’re going to put a fifth liberal on the Supreme Court.” The Republican nominee can go out and say, “We’re going to preserve the balance.”
So “balance” means “conservative majority”—a definition that Woodward found plausible:
In the world now of real voters, I think it is the persuadable voter or the independent who’s likely, in a positive way, to respond to the idea that, “Yeah, let’s preserve the balance, let’s not do anything radical.”
Woodward closed the segment by citing a 1970s Washington Star headline on the occasion of Justice William O. Douglas’ death, which said that everyone, “left, right and center, is going to miss Justice Douglas.” “I think it’s the same for Justice Scalia,” said Woodward—demonstrating that he doesn’t know many leftists.
Wrapping Bigotry in Bill of Rights
“Conservative Lawmakers Push New Legal Protections for Opponents of Gay Rights,” was the New York Times headline over a story (3/3/16) that described how the right was “pushing for a new round of legal protections for opponents of gay rights” across the country. Reporters Alan Blinder and Campbell Robertson describe proposed state legislation, “usually known as First Amendment Defense Acts,” as bills that “generally guarantee protection from any penalties…for those who, on religious grounds, oppose same-sex marriage.”
Of course, there are no penalties for opposing same-sex marriage. You are free to speak out against it, write articles criticizing it, organize protests denouncing it and attend religious services condemning it. Opponents can exercise the full spectrum of First Amendment activities against marriage equality, and require no special defense. By treating as a form of
speech the desire to discriminate—which is what these bills actually are intended to protect, including actions like “refusing to employ” LGBT people —the Times is in effect facilitating the right’s efforts to wrap bigotry in the Bill of Rights.
At MSNBC, Raise Racial Issues at Your Own Risk
MSNBC abruptly cancelled the talkshow of African-American writer and political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry after she wrote a memo to her staff addressing the show’s frequent pre-emption. Pointing out that “social media has noted the dramatic change in editorial tone and racial composition of MSNBC’s on-air coverage,” Harris-Perry declared to the staff members, “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobblehead.”
That was apparently too much for MSNBC executives; “It’s highly unlikely she will continue” at the network, one told the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi (2/28/16) after the memo became public. The email was “destructive to our relationship,” the executive explained.
So bringing up the status of people of color at the network, and declaring yourself “not a token,” is something that you can’t do at MSNBC without destroying your relationship there—despite the fact that, as CNN’s Dylan Byers (3/2/16) pointed out, MSNBC has cancelled or sidelined numerous non-white hosts in recent years, including Martin Bashir, Toure, Karen Finney, Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, Alex Wagner and José Díaz-Balart.
What you can do without permanently harming that relationship, however, is fabricate stories about historical events, as Brian Williams did (Extra!, 2/5/15)—because he was brought back to be the channel’s regular “breaking news anchor” (New York Times, 9/22/15).
