At The Daily Dish, Bell Curve supporter Andrew Sullivan opined, “the notion that the recent election of Obama is a sign of the Apocalypse has, until now, been restricted to Protestant loonies.” Though many members of the chattering class, as segregated an institution as Old Miss before integration, have commented that Barack Obama has gotten a free pass, or as David Gregory, Imus Alumni and new Meet The Press host, said on December 14, “a lot of latitude…,” Obama was confronted with the dirtiest and most racist campaign in American history. Not only did MSNBC bring in its right-wing black clean-up crew including Tara Wall, DeBose, Larry Elder, Amy Holmes, Bush preacher, Rev. Eugene Rivers, and Jonathan Capehart, a black journalist whom The Washington Post considers safe, to criticize the candidate; Richard Prince, media watcher from the Maynard Institute, said that one powerful news agency, The Associated Press, supported McCain. No candidate in the past has been called “The Anti Christ,” or “The Beast of the Apocalypse, 666.” Yet, Howard Kurtz said that the press was one hundred percent behind Obama. One hundred percent? Appearing before a group of radio and television producers, Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, and one of the masterminds behind the notorious Willie Horton ad, made a joke: “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said: ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’”
This remark explains why Fox continued to portray Obama as a terrorist.
Later, during the debate over health legislation, Fox News was responsible for spreading false information about the legislation. On October 20, 2009, indefatigable media watcher, Richard Prince, cited a Pew Poll.
The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, reporting on the health-care reform bills in Congress, reported in August that ‘Among those who say they regularly get their news from Fox News, 45 percent say claims of death panels are true, while 30 percent say they are not true. By contrast, majorities among regular viewers of rival cable news channels MSNBC and CNN and nightly network news say they think it is false that health care legislation will create “death panels.” There are no such “death panels” in the legislation.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that the same misinformation took hold among Fox News viewers about whether the health-care plan will cover illegal immigrants.
Richard Prince also cited Jacob Weisberg on Fox. “Weisberg argues in Newsweek that ‘What matters is the way that Fox’s model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings,’ Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes ‘has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn’t just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.’” CNN wasn’t much better. On Sunday, October 18, during a panel discussion, David Gergen, a Washington insider tried to explain why the public was against the public option. The next day, Monday, an ABC/Washington poll reported that fifty-seven percent of the public supported a public option.
The candidacy of this Celtic-African-American president drew the racist poisons from the American psyche and they crawled out like the slime that oozes from the innards of those victims in the Exorcist movies. Examples:
· A sign was posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Obama's name and the offer of a “free public hanging.”
· In North Carolina, racist graffiti targeting Obama was found in a tunnel near the North Carolina State University campus.
· In a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited one-dollar entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. “Let’s hope we have a winner,” said the sign. A law enforcement official who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that during the campaign there was a spike in anti-Obama rhetoric on the Internet—“a lot of ranting and raving with no capability, credibility or specificity to it.”
· In Denver, a group of men with guns and bulletproof vests made racist threats against Obama and sparked fears of an assassination plot during the Democratic National Convention in August 2008.
· Just before the election, two skinheads in Tennessee were charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxedos.
· In Milwaukee, police officials found a poster of Obama with a bullet going toward his head — discovered on a table in a police station.
One of the most popular white-supremacist Web sites got more than two thousand new members the day after the election, compared with ninety-one new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site, stormfront.org, was temporarily off-line November 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, “I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs’ come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.” The taunts and threats continue.
Despite these threats, pundits continue to complain that the media were giving Obama a free ride. Howard Kurtz, Lou Dobbs, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson and other pundits kept up the mantra that Obama had caused the media to “swoon” over Obama, while giving Sarah Palin and John McCain a hard time. Studies from the Shorenstein Center, George Mason University and LexisNexis concluded otherwise. As late as Sunday, December 28, Kurtz was continuing to describe the media’s attitude toward Barack Obama as “sympathetic,” and none of his fellow panelists Jessica Yellin, Terence Smith, Bill Pressman and Amy Holmes challenged him. Ms. Holmes, a Zambia-born black woman whom the network bosses shuttle from panel to panel for the purpose of dissing the black underclass and Barack Obama, agreed. (Once in awhile she is handled by the fellows over at The National Review where she was brought on to diss Obama. She said of Obama’s race speech, at their site, National Review Online: “My first reaction? Race speeches are rarely good, and this was no exception. For all of Obama’s new talk of change, courage, politics you can believe in, I heard a whole lot of liberal boilerplate dressed up in euphemism and offering no fresh solutions.”)
Studies by reputable organizations, whose goal is not that of drawing ratings by putting down blacks, differ from the conclusions about the media treatment of Obama. On July 27, 2008, James Rainey, writer for the Los Angeles Times wrote:
Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias — but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks. Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.
Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.
During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28 percent of the statements were positive for Obama and 72 percent negative.
I wrote last week that the networks should do more to better balance the airtime. But I also suggested that much of the attention to Obama was far from glowing.
But the center’s director, Robert Lichter, who has won conservative hearts with several of his previous studies, told me the facts were the facts.