FOX News spent a large portion of this past week disingenuously castigating other networks for "not covering" the 9/12 protests. This despite ample evidence that pretty much all outlets either broadcast or printed a thrice-told story about a group of people that comprised no more than 0.057% of the total votes in the 2008 election whining about how they represent the real will of America. Perhaps what FOX meant was that other networks didn't cover the 9/12 protests with anything like the enthusiasm FOX exhibits. For instance, at the April 15 protests, FOX set up stages and gave away $500,000 in free advertising, to say nothing of fawning coverage of this new "movement" in the days preceding and following the protest.
This time they just had a producer deliberately pumping up the crowd and telling them to make some noise so they'd be louder and more intense when FOX came back from commercial (that other video has been taken down, but this one still exists of an off-camera FOX producer waving her arms and pumping up the crowd to get them to respond during a segment by the reporter on location):
There's also this significant reply from CNN's Rick Sanchez, commenting on the protest as well as the producer stoking the crowd:
It might be more accurate to retool the network's slogan to read, "We Decide, We Manufacture and Massage, Then We Report, Then You Decide to Agree with Us or Else We'll Just Repeat Ourselves Until You Do," but that's just woefully unpithy. I'm not even sure how they can complain about other networks' coverage. FOX might have already done all anyone could to rowdy up the masses: heck, they even had a cheerleader to juice up the 9/12 Minutes' Hate. What could MSNBC have added? Amphetamines and glowsticks?
Still, as hypocritical and depressing as all this is, it does get you excited for the coming white-outrage race riots. You can already see the iPhone video of the FOX producer leaning over a railing with a bullhorn, shouting, "Come on! Riot harder."
The obnoxiously ginned-up outrage over other networks' coverage dissipated thanks to good old Jimmy Carter doing his weird schtick where he tells the truth about something. In honor of Marty Peretz's coming columns here, I won't mention that "apartheid" thing. In this case, Carter fed conservatives some critically needed false-sense-of-persecution fuel by mentioning that racism drives much of of the teaparty phenomenon. Now, Jimmy didn't even go to the easier — but still correct — well of mentioning that many of these people are using dog-whistle buzzwords like "states' rights" and "redistribution of wealth," which refer to "states' rights... to not have the federal government intervene against Jim Crow" and the "redistribution of wealth... to lazy black people"; instead, he just called them straight-up racist.
Now, I went to the effort of posting 100 pictures and explaining this sort of stuff in detail, so I think I can restrict my rebuttal to this picture from last Saturday that I only just recently ran across:
Ahahaha, that Jimmy Carter. What a fucking asshole.
Ahahaha, that Jimmy Carter. What a fucking asshole.