This is a great story coming from Big Journolism, let me post a summation of it here:
Rachel Maddow does in her extremely lame attempt to prove that Fox News in general and Bill O’Reilly in particular are trying to make white people afraid of black people. She gives us the following examples:
- The Shirley Sherrod video
- ACORN sting videos
- Van Jones is a Marxist
- Eugene Robinson “traffics in racism”
- Black/White divide on limited government
Here is John Sexton’s response:
- On the Sherrod video, O’Reilly’s report didn’t appear until after she’d been fired at which point it quickly became national news. CNN also ran the clip twice the same night. Is Anderson Cooper trying to scare white people too?
- …Clark Hoyt, ombudsman at the New York Times, looked at all the evidence and concluded that the manufactured sideshow about what the pair wore did not change the fact that they had presented themselves as a pimp and prostitute, nor did it cause the entire sting to unravel…
- As for Van Jones, he is a self-identified Marxist and co-founder of the explicitly communist group STORM. You can read a pdf put out by the group itself here…
- Eugene Robinson writes frequently about racial topics, including this defense of Harry Reid’s statements about the “light-skinned” President. I don’t consider that piece racism, but Robinson definitely traffics in race. Maybe O’Reilly misspoke. Even if he didn’t, where exactly is the fear factor here…
- As for Maddow’s final clip, to which she devotes the most screen time, O’Reilly was discussing the findings of this Gallup survey. How can Maddow, minutes after blasting O’Reilly for his stance on the Sherrod video, then edit the clip of O’Reilly so dishonestly that viewers will have no idea of the proper context of his statements? That level of bullpucky should give Maddow whiplash, but apparently it doesn’t.
…(read more)…