POLITICS JULY 26, 2010
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Washington—The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.
The mainstream media and the Obama administration alike must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its own propaganda to be accepted as news by persuading traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story."
And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama, and against progressives in this year's election.
The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.
The first reaction of the Obama team was not to question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president's inner circle. She could be sacrificed without a thought.
Obama complained on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into a false god.
Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet," but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.
There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that last August, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.
The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.
Thus did Andrew Alexander, The Washington Post's ombudsman, ask why the paper had been slow to report on, as he put it, "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party."
Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: persuade Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, dismissed the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers," she told Politico's Ben Smith. "This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the (Obama) administration."
Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He's a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.
Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law."
This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense—and it's nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it 1,000 times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.
The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting upon the difference between news and propaganda.
E.J. Dionne's e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
15 comments
Well put, EJ and I hope you are correct. The gutless "journalists" employed by mainstream media outlets are more interested in covering conflict, no matter how ridiculous and irrelevant, than policy matters that truly affect Americans - it is much more of a ratings grabber. And Fox News and much of the right-wing smear machine knows this and provides these "journalists" with as much copy as possible. It is often said that you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. The right wing has spent most of the last 20 years changing this dynamic. They get more successful at it with each passing year as the MSM becomes more complicit. Since, most of the time, as Stephen Colbert says, facts have a liberal bias, you need to change the facts. There has been a right-wing freak-out over every Democratic president since FDR. The freak-out is not the phenomenom - the legitimizing of the fears behing the freak-out is relatively new, and can be traced particularly to Bill Clinton's election. In the past, this has been treated as the extemists rants of a relative fringe. But now, in the name of "fairness", these rants are taken seriously by the supposed serious "journalists" and treated as an alternate philosophy, not an alternate reality. With the Clinton presidency and the rise of Fox News & talk radio at that same time, extreme right wing fears (and that is what they mostly peddle) were given full voice - he was going to take away everyone's guns, he was going to raise taxes and tank the economy, your children were going to be exposed to gays in every aspect of their lives, Clinton was disgracing the office, Vince Foster committed suicide, Hillary is a lesbian etc. etc. Don't believe anyone else on this - they all have a liberal bias - only Fox News and Rush Limbaugh know the truth. And the MSM gobbles this up because it is good TV to show talking heads battling one another. Then these "journalists" don't bother to fact-check their guests, and so the guests from the right-wing take advantage of the situation and simply tell bold face lies to make their point. But if the right-wing guest is challenged (as happens rarely), he or she simply says the journalist is an obvious liberal (as is all the media) and can't be trusted. Now the MSM meme is that MSNBC is simply the left wing version of Fox News (a fallacy I'm disappointed to see that even Jon Stewart repeat) so each side has their outlet. Obviously, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow (and soon Lawrence O'Donnel) are liberals - however, they do not have a 'facts be damned' approach. If a "journalist" would watch these two networks for more than a day or two, this would be obvious instead of making this false equivalency. In the end, this is a double-edged sword for conservatives. Sometimes their legitimate arguments get lost in the storm of ridiculousness coming from the extremists who have taken charge of their philosophy. Again, a little fact-checking would be helpful - is anyone keeping score of all the times the fear mongering coming from the right proves to be wrong? Shouldn't someone in the MSM tell Bill Kristol that he has nearly always been proved wrong and stop taking him seriously? Or that Rush Limbaugh and any one of a number of Fox News commentators simply make things up? Unfortunately, "journalists" have allowed Americans become convinced of the legitamacy of these right wind propagandists and I don't know that this can be changed (even after he utter failure of the Bush presidency).
- RobertW
July 24, 2010 at 12:37pm
I think this hits the nail on the head. In particular, the MSM's deathly afraid of being part of the "liberal media." Fairness is not so twisted that the Flat Earth Society would get a respectful hearing if it was a Fox creation.
- MikeB.
July 25, 2010 at 9:34am
The American "liberal" left is at its heart totalitarian. It seeks to suppress dissent from the prevailing anti-American ideology of the MSM. The problem for the left is that the dissenters include the majority of the American middle and working classes.
- bulbman1066
July 26, 2010 at 3:00am
"Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. " Correctly, the law doesn't require them to stop someone from voting. The law merely requires them to be intimidating. Adn with billy clubs and in pseudo military regalia, and yelling slurs, they were intimidating. Are you saying that a white guy in KKK garb at a polling place is OK as long as he does it at a polling place that has 100% white voters? Serious? And tell me, EJ, what date can we expect to see a decline in Fox's ratings start? When IS the beginning of the end? The traditional media are petrified of being called liberal? Then perhaps the journolist should not host Obama staffers and accept invitations offered on the journolist to visit the white house. Ya think?
- seattleeng
July 26, 2010 at 7:38am
I hate to say this, but E.J. Dionne underestimates the gullibility and overestimates the knowledge and intelligence of the American electorate. Fox, with all its shameless lies, exaggerations, and inventions, is far from through. The Obama Administration and liberal media will have to come up with their versions of Bill Clinton's famous "War Room" to promptly counteract and refute Fox' latest venture into mendacity.
- JackR
July 26, 2010 at 7:53am
seattle, the KKK does that and have done that, do you really imagine the KKK acts nice then. The police keep them a fair distance away, and the NBPP was enough of a distance away that everyone could go in and out without a hindrance. And enough about journolist, it is now a huge bore. Republican journalists helped pick Palin, so give me a break. And Fox news is only watched by a few million people daily. and then many people only watch a few minutes. Outside of Smith I never watch it. I hate to admit it but I was suckered in by the video as well so for me to condemn others for being so would be wrong, and yes, we were naive to just how evil Breitbart is. Lesson learned. All this being said, how effective have Fox and friends in evil been? Obama has been passed every part of his agenda except climate and immigration and long term Republicans will come up on the losing end of both of these issues.
- blackton
July 26, 2010 at 10:46am
There is one mainstream "journalist" who routinely chastises Fox News and for its made-up commentary: Jon Stewart. Without his voice, I don't think I could make it through a normal news week.
- cireland
July 26, 2010 at 1:11pm
seattle - can you link to the data showing that anyone was intimidated? Now any interference in someone's ability to vote is a serious matter, but since the Bush administration decided to not pursue criminal charges here, perhaps there wasn't much in the case? And just to play your "look at the dog over there!" game, I do recall the Bush administration not taking action against a bunch of visibly armed militia who were conducting, shall we say, unexpected English tests on a bunch of Hispanic voters. Who did, it might be worth noting, complain about intimidation.
- Nari224
July 26, 2010 at 4:01pm
Blackton, what Obama has passed are dramatically watered down versions of what he's promised, and he has severely disappointed his base in the process. In fact, the health care that passed makes republicans a whole lot happier than democrats. Adn yet Obama gets the double whammy, because his base is demoralized by the lack of public options, and the right that will benefit from the changes doesn't quite understand it enough to give him the credit. And all everyone knows is this guy is spending money like there's no tomorrow. Nari, watch the video. The videoographer tells them they are intimidating. Please dont' defend the indefensible. It makes you look like an ideologue. And no, the Bush department didn't drop a criminal case. There never was a criminal case against these guys. It was always a civil case, and it was dropped in May 2009 according to testimony from J. Christian Adams. Facts, Nari, facts.
- seattleeng
July 26, 2010 at 5:07pm
seattle - "And all everyone knows is this guy is spending money like there's no tomorrow. " It is true that this is the impression, but it's largely due to the plain lies that are been told - lies that you often change the subject on, I've noticed. "There never was a criminal case against these guys." That's the point. If there was a complaint of intimidation, why wasn't it pursued by the Bush Justice department? This did occur under their watch after all. As for Mr Adams - no one is saying that these are not serious charges, and that they do not warrant investigation. However since all we have is J. Christian Adams' testimony and rather curious lack of evidence for the policies that he is claiming, either a large number of people in the DOJ are complicit in an appalling abrogation of people's civil rights, or perhaps something else is going on. Now was this black panther clown doing something wrong, if not illegal? I'd say so. However if he was intimidating someone who wasn't there to vote and was being deliberately provocative, that's not voter intimidation. Not that this justifies what occurred, but neither does it provide any evidence of a policy to not prosecute blacks by the administration. I mean seriously, having looked at the video, I'm pretty hard pressed to see intent or even intimidation - even between the videographer and nightstick wielding clown. There was even a dude on Fox who claimed to have walked between them who didn't feel too unsettled. And even our friends at Fox had to go to some length to point out that there was NO EVIDENCE of any intimidation. Evidence, seattle. You presumably are some sort of an engineer, and thus presumably have some respect for it. You are always welcome to your own opinion, if not your own facts.
- Nari224
July 26, 2010 at 5:32pm
erk - that should read "Now was this black panther clown doing something wrong? No question. Illegal? Hard to get that".
- Nari224
July 26, 2010 at 5:34pm
That's right -- the one thing everyone remembers from 2008 is how the Black Panthers were at polling stations all over the nation bullying and intimidating people! This is like being forced to live a surreal dream concocted in the brain of a resentful white guy living sitting on his couch and drawing his federal disability pension while he rants against 'guvmint'! It does suggest a deep psychic sickness about race, though, and I'd never have thought in 2008 that I'd be saying this in 2010.
- ironyroad
July 26, 2010 at 8:43pm
I'm just an old Republican sissy. Having gotten that off my chest, I freely admit that the "tiny group of crackpots" in my old home town, Philadelphia, would have given me some pause about exercising my franchise. Particularly the guy with the club. Chacun a son gout. The tiny group of crackpots who wave stupid racist signs--that impugn the wavers more than their ostensible targets--apparently leave Dionne trembling. Go figure.
- lsernoff
July 26, 2010 at 9:19pm
lsernoff, I empathize to a greater degree with your feeling than you might think. But can I ask this: You say that the racist sign-wavers "impugn the wavers more than their ostenisble target." Yes, of course they do. It's a very fair point. But do they impugn them in the eyes of people standing with them, next to them, as they wave them? I'd like to believe that. If so, why do these bystanders have apparently no problem with these wavers? I'd like to know that, as I tremble along with Dionne, sissy that I am.
- ironyroad
July 27, 2010 at 10:59pm
RobertW expresses outrage at “gutless ‘journalists’” -- can I presume he means those on the Journolist as well as others not on the list, correct? However, whenever I hear or read complaints about the need to focus on “policy matters” I can’t help but think those two words are simply code-words for getting (forcing?) everyone to come around to a certain point of view (the liberal point of view, precisely). Conflicts and debates, as crappy and distracting and tiresome as they can be, are nonetheless what politics (and a lot of entertainment) are about. Citing Stephen Colbert as source of wisdom on the subject seems silly. Although Colbert is good at silly, which is why I like him. He may be liberal (I don't really know, or care about, his politics) but at least he does have a sense of humor.
- kaybee
July 28, 2010 at 12:43pm