Life
Why black America is rooting against Rupert Murdoch
Beck took a lesson directly from fellow Fox presenter Sean Hannity, who had used similar tactics during the 2008 presidential campaign to stir up controversy over Obama’s supposed links to Bill Ayers. Ayers, a professor, had once had ties to a domestic terrorist group in the 1970s. Much like the Ayers allegations, there wasn’t much to the faux-conspiracy, but the incessant media attention led Jones to resign from Obama’s White House, and he later told the Washington Post the attacks were a “vicious smear campaign” and an effort to use “lies and distortions to distract and divide”.
Fox drove much of the attention which led to the dismantling of ACORN, advocacy group which assisted low-income communities with voter registration, healthcare and affordable housing. Beck, O’Reilly and Hannity all devoted months throughout 2009 criticizing ACORN’s efforts to register mostly black and latino voters in the 2008 election.
In September 2009, Beck broadcast a series of heavily edited undercover videos by conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, which seemed to portray ACORN organizers offering inappropriate tax advice to people who said they were engaged in illegal activities.
Although both the Massachusetts and California Attorney Generals found the videos had been “substantially” edited, and that there was no evidence of criminal conduct by ACORN employees, the media fire storm Fox successfully created had framed ACORN and its Democratic supporters in Congress as corrupt. Following endless investigations, ACORN’s organizational structure buckled under the pressure and threats of defunding.
This is perhaps the worst and most manipulative of all Fox’s corrupt news efforts. It essentially dismantled an organization specifically designed to broaden the voter base among the poor, minority and disadvantaged, and as such helped remove an obvious threat to Republican efforts to win back the Congress and the White House in 2012. ACORN’s demise served as a perfect storm of disenfranchisement.
To add to a long line of mischaracterizations, failure to provide due diligence and responsible reporting, Fox News was the first news source to release Andrew Breitbart’s videos of Shirley Sherrod, which sought to frame her as racist against the white farmers she worked to help. Sherrod was forced to resign from her position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture, after a video of her speaking at an NAACP event in March 2010, was edited to make her seem racist, when in fact Sherrod was sharing a personal story of racial reconciliation and solidarity.
Although Sherrod was later exonerated and offered a new role, she is now suing Breitbart, for “defamation, false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
Rupert Murdoch has a bigger problem than mere phone hacking. The scandal surrounding the questionable practices of Murdoch’s newspaper endeavors in the UK, seem to belie the status quo of the Fox News Network in the U.S.: manipulating the facts to create a story that sells.
Undoubtedly, investigations will follow to ensure that the privacy of American citizens, soldiers and 9/11 victims has not been compromised. But the relentless attacks against President Obama, coded racism and race-baiting by Fox News contributors and hosts means that Murdoch will find very few friends in the African-American community. The 24-hour Republican political machine disguised as a “fair and balanced” journalist organization has been weighed in the balances, and found wanting.
By Edward Wyckoff Williams
