It really is one of the great, enduring mysteries of the last 10 years, and liberal writer Joan Walsh of the Nation elevates it in her latest column: Why on earth haven’t the national media collectively called out Republicans and conservatives for the racists that they are?
That is, of course, absurd. The media machine is nothing if not a factory for constant accusations of racism, all of them aimed at the Right.
Yet Walsh, in earnest, wrote on New Year’s Eve that the media have refused to acknowledge the “profound racial backlash” that came from the GOP after the election of Barack Obama, which she says persists today.
“Fox [News] is evil, but it sometimes succeeded because Democrats are cowards, and utterly unprepared to fight evil enemies,” she wrote. “Hosts like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the rising Sean Hannity regularly peddled those and other racial panic stories, while the mainstream media generally, and even leading Democrats, tried hard to avoid seeing what was happening.”
I don’t know how Walsh defines “mainstream media,” but she must be excluding her former employers at MSNBC. The cable news channel would not have enough content to keep the lights on if its on-air hosts were forbidden to hurl multiple accusations of racism at Republicans every quarter-hour.
Back in 2014, MSNBC’s Twitter account posted a Cheerios TV ad featuring a mixed-race family. MSNBC had captioned the video saying, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.”
And that’s just typical. A year before that, the race-obsessed Melissa Harris-Perry, who at the time had her own show on MSNBC, hosted a segment during which she and a panel of guests picked at a photo of Mitt Romney’s family. Pointing out the recently adopted black grandson sitting on Romney’s knee, one the guest said, “I think this picture is great. It really sums up the diversity of the Republican Party, the RNC. At the convention, they find the one black person.”
More recently, regular Morning Joe guest Donny Deutsch in August 2017 said of President Trump, “He is a racist.”
Maybe Walsh is boycotting MSNBC — otherwise, I’m not sure how she has deluded herself into thinking that the media’s biggest problem is its refusal to call anyone racist.
It would be newsworthy if a day were to pass without cable news liberals accusing Republicans of racism.
