Newsrooms are giving Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn a pass after the twelve-term South Carolina congressman called conservatives a “cancer” and blamed them for the death of Walter Scott, an unarmed 50-year-old African-American who was shot and killed by a police officer Saturday in South Carolina.
While speaking with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Wednesday about the Scott case, Clyburn, who currently serves as the assistant leader of House Democrats, brought up legislation supported by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-of-center advocacy group that the South Carolina lawmaker incorrectly identified as “Alex.”
“But the problem we’ve got is that a climate has been created in the country that’s causing these things to occur all over,” he said. Members of ALEC “have drawn up these legislations, pieces of legislation like ‘Stand Your Ground,’ that legislation gives a license for people to be vigilantes. They are the ones that are drawing up all of these, uh, so-called voter ID laws. They are the ones that have been drawing up these unfair redistricting plans.”
ALEC’s Stand Your Ground model legislation is unrelated to conduct of police officers, though it was brought up in coverage of the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. (Although it was widely discussed in that instance, Florida’s Stand Your Ground law was not invoked in the 2013 murder trial of George Zimmerman, who won acquittal using a standard self-defense argument.)
The South Carolina lawmaker upped his rhetoric.
“These people are a cancer eating at the innards of our society. And it’s time for our elected officials to start speaking out about this because the climate that’s being created is not a good climate,” he said. “And that’s why you have these rogue police officers feeling they have license to do what they want to do and there will be no consequences paid for it. And I think that that’s the mindset of this police officer.”
The officer who shot Scott, Michael T. Slager, has since been charged with murder.
Though Clyburn — a former House majority whip whose daughter Mignon Clyburn is a commissioner and former acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission — is a prominent politician, his claim that conservatives are partly responsible for violence against minorities appears to have gone unnoticed by the nation’s newsrooms. This stands in sharp contrast to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion in February during a “controversial” address that President Obama does not love the United States.
The press’ response to Giuliani’s supposedly controversial remarks was swift and unrelenting, with reporters and commenters condemning his off-the-cuff remarks as “low,” “sad,” “stupid,” “repugnant,” “the worst,” “weak,” “sick” and “offensive.”
Clyburn, by contrast, has generated no such denunciations from media.
