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There has been some speculation as to whether Dylann Roof is insane, or was so at the time of the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Certainly the amount of premeditation that went into the mass murder he planned and perpetrated should make us wary about accepting too readily the assertion that he was crazy. But while we might wonder about Roof, there is no doubt at all that for its commentary on this horrific, hate-filled crime Fox News should be indicted in the court of public opinion for its role in this and other racist acts. The network surely was conscious of what it was doing in aiding and abetting; it surely planned to furnish Roof with an alibi regarding the exact nature of his heinous crime.
Indeed, if Roof is convicted I suggest we regard Fox as an accessory after the fact: someone who assists another 1) who has committed a felony, 2) after the person has committed the felony, 3) with knowledge that the person committed the felony, and 4) with the intent to help the person avoid arrest or punishment. An accessory after the fact may be held liable for, inter alia, obstruction of justice.
I don’t care to debate whether the Fox commentators are sincere when they voice their corrosive ideas, or if it is simply a matter of a herd mentality that kicks in when more than one of them is in a room and the klieg lights are on, but there is no denying that they and Fox make money off this. This is a classic example of sensationalistic yellow journalism. And it’s worse, because it is also ideologically driven and it perpetuates a racist ideology.
How else could Steve Doocy opine on Fox News that it was “extraordinary” that the Charleston church shooting was called a hate crime? How else can Fox wonder if it had a racial element to it when Roof is on record as saying during the shooting that he wanted to kill black people because they are “taking over”?
This combination of warped mentality, groupthink and profiting off tragedy is the hallmark of Fox, but the poison of its commentators is effective because is taps into a history of white supremacist belief that appears widely and perniciously in many guises.
Fox provides a support system for hatred, and in this instance its collaborators include people like Rick Santorum, who in a craven act of opportunism turns a racist attack into an attack on, what else, himself and his political base, the religious right; Lindsey Graham, who argues the same and defends flying the Confederate flag as a sign of Southern pride and defiance; Rick Perry, who called the shooting an “accident” (OK, he has now corrected that — he says he meant “incident,” but what an interesting Freudian slip); and those in the NRA who make this about their cause, the right to own arms. Apparently it’s about everything except race, and, more specifically, white supremacy. I would call this mutual support system that radiates out from the cesspool of Fox News the “Larger Fox Network.”
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This network has been particularly active ever since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, and has adopted the rhetoric and vocabulary, and reasoning, of age-old white supremacy. As David Remnick points out,
the words attributed to the shooter are both a throwback and thoroughly contemporary: one recognizes the rhetoric of extreme reaction and racism heard so often in the era of Barack Obama. His language echoed the barely veiled epithets hurled at Obama in the 2008 and 2012 campaigns (“We want our country back!”) and the raw sewage that spewed onto Obama’s Twitter feed (@POTUS) the moment he cheerfully signed on last month. “We still hang for treason don’t we?” one @jeffgully49, who also posted an image of the President in a noose, wrote.
South Carolina has undergone enormous changes in the decades since Jim Crow, but it is hard to ignore the setting of this rampage, the atmosphere. Seven years ago, as Obama was campaigning in South Carolina, the Times columnist Bob Herbert visited the state, encountering the Confederate flag flying on the grounds of the State Capitol building and, nearby, a statue of Benjamin (Pitchfork Ben) Tillman, a Reconstruction-era governor and senator, who defended white supremacy and the lynching of African-Americans, saying, “We disenfranchised as many as we could.”
Now, in the face of all this, it is heartening to see so much strong, smart, righteous commentary pouring out, in both the mainstream media and from other sources. My concern, however, it that after this “story cycle” wanes, what will be the lasting effect? Make no mistake, the Larger Fox Network will still be intact, still spewing its garbage and hatred. We need to do something about that.Click & Close Ads
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Wednesday, June 24, 2015
