So wrote Saul D. Alinsky in his landmark (and final) work, Rules for Radicals.
During Tuesday night’s mainstream media coverage of the Republican National Convention, the “impartial” veneer of the Leftist/Democrat/Media complex completely disappeared, giving viewers a rare insight into the crude, bigoted, and insensitive nature of their behind-closed-doors attitudes about minorities who are part of the Republican party.
During key speeches by former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, Mia Love, a black candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Utah, and Texas senatorial hopeful Ted Cruz, MSNBC deliberately chose to cut away from the convention podium and instead entertain their viewers with talking-head commentary. And on the NBC News page, none of the video from these speakers is available.
After Mia Love’s speech, leftist cyberstalkers hacked her Wikipedia entry, embellishing her bio by describing her as “a total sellout to the Right Wing Hate Machine and the greedy bigots who control the GOP and love to see people like Mia Love be exploited like the House Nigger she truly is.” Liberals in the Twitterverse wasted no time labeling her an “Aunt Tom,” a “traitor,” and *horrors* a Haitian.
Harper’s magazine tried to stir the pot by erroneously reporting that delegates started chanting “USA! USA” during a short speech by Puerto Rican Zoraida Fonalledas, the chairwoman of the Committee on Permanent Organization, presumably in response to her heavy Spanish accent. Harper’s later published an editor’s note clarifying the incident and explaining that the chanting and disorderly conduct had begun earlier as part of a response to the Ron Paul delegation from Massachusetts, and had nothing to do with Fonalledas.
And as Doug Johnson previously reported, an open mic at an ABC News live feed from the convention picked up an offhand comment by David Chalian, the Yahoo News DC Bureau Chief, who suggested that Republicans were completely unconcerned with Hurricane Isaac, and “are happy to have a party with black people drowning.” Chalain was fired by Yahoo News for his comment.
As Roger Simon correctly observes, these aren’t accidental occurrences. They are the result of a culture that fosters bigotry and hate under the guise of exposing the assumed bigotry and hate of others. In response to Chalain’s quip, Simon asks, “Why would anyone dream of saying such a thing in a semi-public situation if he didn’t feel safe and among friends?” The fact that a few people in the room chuckled after Chalain’s remark seems to fortify this assumption with alarming seriousness.
Four years ago, the mainstream media erased any perceptions of objectivity by ruthlessly attacking Sarah Palin while simultaneously whitewashing anything in Barack Obama’s past that might prove to be controversial, and deliberately spiking any reporting on the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter affair until after Edwards was safely out of the running for the Democrat nomination. And then there was Ezra Klein’s JournoList, a a Google Groups forum where Democratic party strategists and left-leaning journalists could openly discuss tactics for promoting the Democratic party agenda in their reporting.
Is this what happens when intellectual laziness overtakes a peer group, and name-calling takes the place of honest reporting or an open-minded discussion of differences in policy objectives? I certainly believe so.
And the fascinating thing is, no one is trying to trap journalists or strong-arm them into saying foolish things or covering up facts that don’t fit the Leftist narrative. They are doing it themselves, voluntarily. They own it. They built it. And no amount of ‘shared responsibility’ rhetoric is going to get them off the hook this time.
