This week’s Liberal Media Scream features a key NBC reporter advancing the narrative that the difficulties most are facing in early voting this year are really moves to suppress the black vote, including long voting lines.
Reporter Cynthia McFadden tied the current situation to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Focusing her story on the views of the Rev. James Lawson, she charged that a decision by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “follows the plantation owners of the 1870s who used bullets and guns to stop the voting.”
The governor was criticized for having just one voting drop off location in each county. Unmentioned was his decision to expand the early voting period by six days.
As many early voters — white, black, Latino, Asian, and others — have seen, long lines are typical throughout the country, which has seen record numbers of early voting.
From the Friday, Oct. 30 NBC Nightly News:
CYNTHIA MCFADDEN: Tonight, a question: Do all eligible voters, regardless of their race, have an equal shot at casting their ballots? We turned to 92-year-old Rev. James Lawson.
MCFADDEN: Voter suppression isn’t, sadly, a thing of the past.
REVEREND JAMES LAWSON: Oh, yes. It’s a continuation of USA history.
MCFADDEN: Rev. Lawson says long lines, ID requirements, the purge of voter lists, and reduced access to ballot drop boxes makes voting harder than it should be, especially for people of color.
LAWSON: It’s a form of racism.
LAWSON (from old clip): Our power has always been in ourselves.
MCFADDEN: Racism is something he’s fought against, nonviolently, his whole life. Martin Luther King Jr. called him one of the noblemen in their quest for equality.
LAWSON: Registering to vote became a primary issue from Day One. A black person could lose everything by registering to vote.
MCFADDEN: Including their lives, which is why, he says, it hurts so much to see that voter suppression is still with us, 55 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. He cites Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s October decision that voters will have only one place to return their mail-in ballots in each county. The governor says it will “enhance ballot security.” Lawson says it will hamper minority voting as some of the counties with huge minority populations are as big as eastern states.
LAWSON: It’s absolute suppression, regression. It follows the plantation owners of the 1870s who used bullets and guns to stop the voting. He’s using the technique of voting to stop the voting.
MCFADDEN: Gov. Abbott’s order was struck down by a Texas state court, but three federal judges in the 5th Circuit, all appointed by President Trump, approved the governor’s plan.
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our weekly pick: “An excellent example of how the old school media eagerly advance an agenda, in the face of contrary evidence, which sees everything through the liberal prism of race, in this case painting a conservative who enacted rules that treat all citizens the same as some kind of a racist move to suppress minority voters. And plenty of very white places around the country also have long lines to vote.”
Rating: Three out of five screams.
