“And Idiots They Are”: Once Again, Conservative Media Treat Their Audience Like Idiots
Dinesh D’Souza is one of a number of people who has made a good living over the years trafficking in anti-liberal screeds, culminating in his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage and follow-on film 2016, in which he charges that President Stokely Charmi—excuse me, President Barack Obama is consumed with anti-white racism, hatred of America, and generalized fury because he’s living out the “Kenyan anti-colonialism” of the father he barely knew. It’s a story pitched to the deranged, but there’s a healthy market for that in the right, as we know.
So when D’Souza was charged by a U.S. Attorney with violating campaign finance laws with a straw donor scheme, it wasn’t surprising that some conservatives ran to his defense. You might think they’d take the opportunity to attack the law as unjust, particularly since D’Souza’s lawyer all but admitted his guilt, essentially saying that sure, he violated the law, but he only did so out of friendship for the candidate in question and not for corrupt purposes (“Simply put, there was no ‘quid pro quo’ in this case, nor was there even any knowledge by the candidate that Campaign Finance Rules may have been violated. Mr. D’Souza did not act with any corrupt or criminal intent whatsoever. He and the candidate have been friends since their college days, and at worst, this was an act of misguided friendship by D’Souza”). But no.
Instead, you get the conspiracy theories, which Ben Dimiero helpfully gathered here. Matt Drudge tweets, “They are going after the Obama critics with indictments. VA Gov. Now Dinesh D’souza. Holder unleashing the dogs…” Nationally syndicated radio host and frequent Fox news guest host Laura Ingraham says the indictment “is more about stifling political dissent and intimidating other people from speaking out than it is about any real serious allegation of wrongdoing.” Rush Limbaugh, the most successful radio host in America, tells his listeners that the Obama administration is “trying to criminalize as many Republicans and conservatives as they can.”
To be sure, plenty of conservatives think that’s ridiculous. But think about the argument here: Do these folks actually believe that the Attorney General of the United States is sitting around with his aides and says, “I’ve had enough. That D’Souza? I want him taken down! He’s been a thorn in our side for too long.” Then he places a call to the White House. “Mr. President? Good news. I think we found a way to get Dinesh D’Souza.” “Thank God!” replies Obama. “He could destroy this entire presidency if we don’t deal with him.”
The answer is, of course they don’t think that. But they think their audiences do. They think the people who read their web sites and listen to their radio shows are so stupid that they’d believe there’s a conspiracy at the highest levels of the federal government aimed at…Dinesh D’Souza.
The left’s media stars may be far from perfect in a variety of ways. But one thing you can say about them as a group is that they don’t assume their audience is made up of idiots.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 24, 2014
“A Symbolism Of Pure Hate And Violence”: The Despicable Laura Ingraham Outdoes Herself
We can’t be surprised by the right-wing ignorance about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the politics of the 1963 March on Washington. Today’s conservative leaders are the political descendants of the forces who fought the civil rights movement as a radical, most likely Communist plot. When the movement turned out to be wholesome and all-American, when a quarter of a million marchers descended on the capital without riots or violence 50 years ago, well, then, it had to be co-opted, it had to prove that America was living up to its highest principles, that those noble people were satisfied with what the system gave them — a Civil Rights bill and a Voting Rights bill — and they went home, and marched no more. Dr. King’s assassination five years later made it easier for them to do that.
There are so many ignorant right-wing reactions to this anniversary to talk about, but the award for the most vicious and stupid has to go to radio host Laura Ingraham, who insists that those of us who are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the march this week are trying “to co-opt the legacy of Martin Luther King into a modern-day liberal agenda.”
Actually, Ingraham is so wrong, she’s sort of right. Liberals did co-opt King’s radical, anti-corporate and antiwar agenda long ago. The King we commemorate today is a friendly shadow of his challenging, radical, visionary self. (Read Harold Meyerson on “The Socialists Who Made the March on Washington,” for a necessary corrective.)
But that’s not what the ignorant and vicious Ingraham was saying. She’s pretending King was some kind of conservative hero whose message of colorblindness – and that wasn’t his message at all – has been co-opted by liberal race-baiters and whiners and malcontents, who just won’t accept that Bobby Jindal is right when he talks about the “end of race,” because a first-generation Indian immigrant’s experience of racism is identical to that of people who were enslaved for hundreds of years, and he gets to decide when racism is over. Ingraham’s co-opting comment was just dumb. Typically dumb. What was unusually vicious, even for the often nasty radio host, was that she decided to interrupt an audio clip of the heroic Rep. John Lewis, the youngest person to speak at the march 50 years ago, speaking on Saturday, with the sound of a crackling gunshot.
A gunshot. After the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, after the gunning down of so many civil rights workers over the years, Ingraham thought it was funny, or clever, or provocative, to “symbolically” cut off Lewis’ speech with the sound of a gun. The civil rights hero, who had his skull fractured on the first 1965 Selma march, falls silent in mid-sentence, as though he’d been hit by a sniper while addressing the crowd. (Listen to it on Media Matters; it’s more disturbing than you can imagine just reading about it.)
Lewis is in mid-speech, talking about the unfinished business of civil rights in America. “We must say to the Congress: fix the Voting Rights Act. We must say to the Congress: Pass comprehensive immigration reform. It doesn’t make sense that millions of our people …”
And then a shot rings out. Ingraham picks up what Lewis was saying. “OK. ‘It doesn’t make sense that millions of our people … are living in the shadows.’ They’re not only not living in the shadows, they’re appearing at the State of the Union speech. They’re actually visiting with the president in the White House. I think we have to drop that ‘living in the shadows’ thing. They might be standing on the street corner, but they’re not living in the shadows.”
Ingraham’s entitled to her opinion on immigration reform – she’s implacably against it, with her nativist buddy Pat Buchanan, who also appeared on the show – but I have to wonder why she chose to silence Lewis, symbolically at least, with a gunshot. It’s no coincidence she’s also an NRA mouthpiece whipping up fear that the government is coming for our guns. All of the white-grievance mongers are getting angrier, and their brew of pro-gun paranoia and white racial resentment is toxic. Ingraham should be ashamed of herself, but she’s just another rodeo clown, and she has no shame.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 27, 2013
“Paranoid And Ethically Challenged”: Boston And The Right-Wing Media’s Collapse
Prefacing his comments by insisting he knows “how foreign affairs work,” Glenn Beck on April 18 announced that his website, The Blaze, was breaking news about the Boston Marathon bombing: A Saudi national student on a student visa and was “absolutely involved” in the Patriot’s Day blast was being deported by the U.S. government for security reasons.
Beck went further, claiming the student, or “dirt bag,” as the host described him, was “possibly the ringleader” in the bombing that killed three people and injured more than one hundred, and the government was deliberately covering it up.
Beck urged listeners to spread the breaking news via Twitter and Facebook because, he warned, the mainstream media would ignore the revelation. But the right-wing media would pick up the slack. Fox News’ Sean Hannity helped launch the story on April 17 and continued to fan it yesterday, claiming the student had previously “been involved with a terrorist or terror activity,” while a swarm of right-wing sites pushed the paranoid tale.
By making his wild allegations, Beck was asking listeners to ignore the fact that law enforcement officials had previously, and repeatedly, denied earlier right-wing media claims that the Saudi student had been taken into “custody,” or was in any way responsible for the blast.
Indeed, officials at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security both soundly denied the story, explaining that there were two different Saudi nationals: one recovering in a Boston hospital who had witnessed and been injured in the explosions but was not a suspect, and another in ICE custody who was unrelated to the bombing investigation. Beck responded by calling for President Obama to be impeached for what he considered the sprawling government cover-up that now surrounded the student, Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda.
So yeah, it was that kind of week for the right-wing media. It was a debacle.
In the same week that Pulitzer prizes were announced honoring the finest in American journalism, many in the far-right media worked to set news standards in mindless, awful behavior in the wake of the Boston attack.
Faced with covering the most important American terror news story in a decade, too many players opted to just make stuff up. Prompting witch hunts, they cast innocents as would-be killers and then couldn’t be bothered with apologies.
It was a memorable week in which the conservative media’s highest profile newspaper, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, seemed committed to getting as many stories wrong about the Boston attack as possible.
The hapless Post somehow managed to completely botch the simplest Journalism 101 fact of how many people were killed in the Patriot’s Day attack. But hey, according to beleaguered Post editor Col Allan the Post tried its best and that’s all that really matters. (It would’ve taken a “crystal ball” to get the story right, Allan now complains.) So no, there doesn’t appear to be much introspection unfolding inside Murdoch’s daily; a big-city tabloid that managed to get wrong, for days, a breaking crime story.
Yes, CNN this week was forced to concede mistakes when it reported sources had informed the news channel that arrests had been made in the case. But CNN quickly, and publicly, corrected the errors. Those unfortunate miscues happen when reporters let a be-first mindset trump the more important be-right standard. What we saw from portions of the far-right press this week however, was completely different; they almost couldn’t have gotten more stories if they had tried.
Of course Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham used the terror attacks to push her partisan agenda about immigration reform. (This, before she knew anything about the suspects.) Of course chronic Obama critics like Fox News host Oliver North attacked the president for traveling to Boston to attend a prayer service for the terror victims; to try to help comfort the rattled city. And of course Fox News couldn’t wait more than five minutes after that prayer service concluded before inviting Stephen Hayes on to criticize Obama for how he’d handled the issue of gun legislation.
That’s what anti-Obama programming looks like and Fox News saw little reason to alter that chronically caustic approach this week.
What was truly stunning though, as highlighted by irresponsible rants about the Saudi student, was the aggressive push by key conservative media players to simply concoct stories about the breaking news event.
Back to Beck:
I believe this is possibly the ringleader, this guy is absolutely involved, and we are flying this dirt bag out of the country because he has connections and we are covering up.
Keep in mind, this was after unethical right-wing bloggers had already harassed the Saudi bombing victim online, publishing his name, home address, and what they claimed were Facebook pictures of the 20-year-old Saudi national student. The same student police had cleared of any implication in the blast. (His only crime this week appeared to be his Saudi origin.)
And who led the early crusade against the bomb victim? Murdoch’s New York Post, which erroneously reported he was a “suspect” who had been taken “into custody.”
The same Post, of course, which then made headlines by irresponsibly splashing on its front page a photo of two local men at the marathon finish line, one a high school runner, and putting them under the headline “Bag Men,” strongly suggesting they were involved with the terror attack. They were not. But that didn’t stop ethically-challenged blogger Jim Hoft from referring to them six times in one report as “suspects” in the deadly blast.
“Grossly irresponsible” and “egregious” were some of the descriptions media pro’s used to explain the Post’s shocking performance this week. As one journalism professor told Media Matters, “It does appear that the Post, there is something crazy going on there.”
Trust me, it’s not just the Post.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, April 19, 2013
“The MarcoPhone”: Marco Rubio’s Life Is About To Get Complicated
Marco Rubio has had a pretty charmed political life. He rose quickly through the ranks in the Florida legislature, won a Senate seat without too much trouble at the tender age of 39, then suddenly found himself the “Republican savior” a mere two years after arriving in Washington. At a time when the GOP is desperate to appeal to Latinos, he’s a young, smart, dynamic Latino who could be their presidential nominee in 2016. What could go wrong?
Immigration reform, that’s what. Many elite Republicans feel, and not without reason, that while supporting comprehensive reform might not win them the votes of Latinos, opposing it will pretty much guarantee that those votes will be lost to them. And Rubio almost has no choice but to be one of the leaders, if not the leader, of the party in that effort. He can’t be the Great Latino Hope if he isn’t. Trouble is, lots and lots of rank-and-file Republicans, particularly the kind who vote in presidential primaries, don’t much like reform the way it’s shaping up. Sure, under the “Gang of 8” plan in the Senate it’ll take 13 years for a current undocumented immigrant to become an American citizen. But for many in the party’s base, that’s about 113 years too quick. Enter the MarcoPhone. Wait, what? Get a load of this:
Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. Despite the moniker, it predated the current administration by decades and rose to prominence last year mostly due to a viral video of a female black Obama supporter talking about the program.
Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”
The provision in question doesn’t give phones to undocumented immigrants, it gives phones to people who live on the border so they can call the Border Patrol if they see people crossing from Mexico. But as Ed Kilgore says, “I’m having trouble feeling bad for Rubio getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Tea Party delusion.” It’ll certainly be an interesting test of Rubio’s and his team’s communication skills to see if they can squash this (they’re already trying).
What folks like Ingraham understand is that when you’re trying to gin up outrage about a big, complex piece of legislation, the way to do it is to find some component of the bill that is weighted with symbolic value and will hit directly on your target audience’s resentments and fears. It doesn’t matter how minor the provision is, or how much you need to distort its actual function and intent. All that matters is that it’ll get people pissed off.
“Death panels” was the prototypical example. It told people who feared increased government power and control that the Affordable Care Act would literally give heartless Washington bureaucrats the power to decide who lives and dies. It was not just a lie but an absurd lie, an insane lie. But it worked, at least well enough. Gun advocates who wanted to defeat the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal went around saying it included a “national gun registry,” despite the fact that the bill prohibited the government from ever making such a registry, because they knew that would play on the most paranoid fears of gun nuts who think that any moment the jackbooted AFT thugs are going to come busting down their door to confiscate their AR-15s. The MarcoPhone can function the same way. What does it tell people in the anti-immigrant portion of the GOP base? That a bunch if illegals aren’t just getting amnesty, they’re going to be getting freebies, paid for with your tax dollars!
If it isn’t nipped in the bud, this could be deadly for Rubio. His Tea Party credentials may be impeccable, but if he starts looking soft on the foreign horde to the south, a lot of Republican primary voters will start getting suspicious of him. It’s possible that now that it has been explained to them, people like Ingraham will back off, especially since the guy they’re attacking is one of their own. As long as they still consider him one of their own.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 18, 2013
“Unbridled Hypocisy”: Laura Ingraham Has the World’s Worst Imagination
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham is outraged — outraaaged! — that President Obama met with some MSNBC anchors at the White House on Tuesday, according to her daily newsletter:
“Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz all stopped by the White House to discuss the President’s fiscal cliff proposal. Can anyone even imagine how the press would have reacted if Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy? They would have been rightly outraged.”
Yes, let’s all put on our imagination hats and try as hard as we can to imagine what that meeting would look like. George W. Bush would be seated in an Oval Office chair, doing jazz hands in front of a bust of Winston Churchill. On his left, Fox News host Sean Hannity would be pensively smelling his hand on a couch with conservative personality Michael Medved. On his right, conservative personalities Neil Boortz and Mike Gallagher would be sharing another couch. And, just for imagination’s sake, let’s put conservative personality Laura Ingraham in there, too, right next to the president. Now, obviously, such a scene never actually transpired, but — wait, what? Oh. It did.
After Media Matters revealed Ingraham’s hypocrisy to the world, a producer responded with the classic “Ingraham didn’t actually write the newsletter, and also, the two things are totally different because I said so” defense.
During Laura’s brief radio hiatus, the Daily Fix is written by staff. Although I didn’t know Laura had visited the Bush White House with other conservative radio hosts, the circumstances of her meeting the president were quite different. Laura did not go to the White House to advise the president, but was simply briefed on policy for perhaps an hour.
For what it’s worth, the MSNBC hosts didn’t “advise” Obama. They were, uh, briefed on policy:
“This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction,” Earnest said in a statement Tuesday.
As embarrassing as this whole episode is for Team Ingraham, they’re not the only ones who should have done a little research before going into full fauxtrage mode about the MSNBC meeting. Take the hosts of Fox & Friends (please!), for example, who overreacted in typical fashion. “I’m shocked by that,” Brian Kilmeade said. “To invite five talk show hosts in, all from the same channel? That’s outrageous.” Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, claimed yesterday that the sit-down with Obama destroyed any “illusion whatsoever that there’s objectivity going on at MSNBC.”
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, December 6, 2012
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