Paranoid constructions of the Librul Media and the Kermit Gosnell case

Claiming there is a Liberal Media conspiracy against all right-thinking Christian white folks has been a staple of Republican conservative propaganda in more-or-less its current form since Vice President and later convicted felon Spiro Agnew made his well-publicized attacks on The Media during the Nixon Administration. It has its precedents in the traditional of paranoid political thinking: the Jewish media conspiracy of the 1930s, the secret Communists in Hollywood, the South-hating Yankee media during the civil rights movement.

It's become a foundational myth (in Georges Sorel's sense) of today's Republican Party.

Ironically, its usage by conservative becomes more and more intense, long after the point (the Iraq War latest) where one sure mark of a living breathing liberal was that they didn't regard the mainstream media as "liberal" or even especially competent as news media.

Since conservative opinion and news outlets market themselves non-stop against "the liberal media," it seems a little odd to think of a particular outcropping of the phenomenon being an upsurge. To have an upsurge, you would need to have a slacking off every now and then!

Like many favorite claims of Republicans these days, the Librul-Media-ignored-it claim on this case has some basic empirical problems, as Dashiell Bennett explains in The Gosnell Trial Is About Many Thing, but Media Bias Isn't One of Them The Atlantic Wire 04/12/2013:

To begin with, the idea that the trial hasn't been covered by news outlets is disproved by a cursory search of the archives. Most major outlets have written something about the trial. In fact, a lot of them did so two years ago when the story first broke. There hasn't been as much coverage in the last three months, but that's partly because the 280-page grand jury report has been available for some time, and the "headline-worthy testimony" has not been kept secret. If you haven't heard about it until this week, it's only because you were reading the wrong websites. (And local outlets are doing a great job and aren't that hard to find.)

But the fact that it's not true won't stop the antiabortionists from claiming it. In the name of Jesus, of course. Because when you're out to "save the lives" of "unborn babies", such is considered perfectly legitimate by the anti-choice movement: "Those in the media who promote abortion have their reasons for wanting to keep quiet about the atrocities of former abortionist, Kermit Gosnell," writes Dan Delzell in the Christian Post (The Face of America in Gosnell's Mirror 04/15/2013). That's a pretty mealy-mouthed way of putting it, of course. If criticized, he claim he didn't say the Librul Media was doing that, only that they had good reason to do so.

Media Matters has several pieces about the Gosnell case and the conservative conspiracy-mongering about he Librul Media in connection with:

Eric Boehlert, While Ignoring Gosnell Trial, NY Post Condemns 'Liberal Media' For Ignoring Gosnell Trial 04/12/2013.

Ari Rabin-Hav, The Anti-Choice Monster 04/12/2013

Chelsea Rudman, Erin Burnett Latest In Media To Push Claim That "The Left" Ignored Gosnell Trial After She Ignored Gosnell Trial 04/12/2013

Oliver Willis, After Spending 21 Minutes Covering Arias Trial, Fox's The Five Attack Media For Covering Arias But Not Gosnell 04/12/2013

Jeremy Holden, How The Kermit Gosnell Case Is An Indictment On [sic] The Anti-Choice Movement 04/15/2013

At Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald takes up the question, On Gosnell "blackout," where were conservatives before this week? 04/12/2013: "A search of the Congressional Record for the 112th Congress (2011-2012) turns up zero mentions for Gosnell, while a search of the current 113th Congress finds three — all from yesterday."

Tags: kermit gosnell

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: Segregation ideology and contemporary conservatism

Chauncey DeVega can be blunt: "Given what we know about racial framing in the news media, and the increasing overlap of conservatism and racism (they are now almost one and the same thing) ..." (my emphasis)

That's from Colorblind Politics in Practice? Puzzling Through Kermit Gosnell and Racial Framing in the Right-Wing Media WARN 04/14/2013 about the case of Gosnell, who as Scott Lemeiux explains, is "a Philadelphia doctor accused of committing infanticide, and maiming and, in some cases, killing his patients (most of them poor women) in an unsanitary abortion clinic." (Five Lessons from the Gosnell Abortion-Clinic Controversy The American Prospect Online 04/15/2013.

Is DeVega's statement fair, that "conservatism and racism" are "now almost one and the same thing"?

It is fair, because what is popularly called "conservatism" in the US largely equals the Republican Party and the Republican Party has fully embraced voter-suppression approaches targeted at African-American and Latino voters.

The denial of the vote to black citizens was the core the segregation system in the South from roughly 1875-1970. The terror involved in lynch law, the discriminatory acts of employers and law enforcement, and the neurotic trappings of segregation proper (the "Jim Crow" laws with separate public drinking fountains for blacks and whites) were all very much part of that system. But the political core of it was the disenfranchisement of blacks. It took that, and the collapse of the national parties' commitment to protecting basic civil rights in the South, to overthrow the democratic governments of Reconstruction.

The fact that the Republican Party has now made racially-targeted voter suppression part of their standard operating procedure means that they are now trying to reimpose a key element of white racism, white supremacy and segregation.

Does that mean that the Democratic Party now has clean hands and a pure heart on issues involved with white racism? Leaving aside whether a political party can be said to have a "heart," no, it doesn't. There are many aspects of American life, such as the way in which law enforcement and prison sentencing work, especially in connection with the never-ending War on Drugs, that the Democratic Party either accepts or gives a low priority to correcting. President Obama's proposed cuts to benefits for Social Security and Medicare would disproportionately harm communities of color.

But it's also safe to say that those who are concerned with issues of opposing discrimination and eliminating racial discrimination do not, with rare exceptions, identify with the Republican Party and what we take for "conservatism" in the US today.

And voter suppression is a red line on this. Anyone who supports voter suppression supports white racism, whatever they may claim their subjective feelings are about racism.

DeVega raises a thought-provoking set of questions about the Kermit Gosnell case. It's a cause for the antiabortion movement which is a central part of today's Republican Party. But he observes, noting that Gosnell is black:

... given the Right-wing media's efforts in 2008 to smear then candidate Barack Obama as a "radical" "baby-killer" and how contemporary conservatives wallow in white racial resentment, the connection between racial anxiety and hostility, partisanship, abortion as a public policy issue, and Kermit Gosnell should be too much to resist. My survey, however limited, of the Right-wing media has revealed few if any such connections.

One suggestion he raises as a question is to ask if because antiabortionists argue that "abortion is a tool used by 'progressives' to commit 'genocide' against the African-American community, have conservative opinion leaders developed 'race neutral' talking points about Kermit Gosnell to mobilize the anti-women's reproductive rights base?"

His aren't easy questions, though people who have been following that case closely might have good answers. With the activists antiabortion movement, you get deep into fanaticism and Christian dominionism, and many of the experienced activists are media-savvy. That particular argument that the Evil Libruls want to use abortion to commit genocide against blacks is in itself so uncoupled from what we quaintly call reality that its a marker of serious fanaticism. When rightwingers are indulging in this extreme of racial role-reversal with a genuinely weird twist, you don't have to dig too far to find white racist attitudes. But that doesn't answer his question just quoted, which has to do with the public vocabulary used for conservatives to mobilize supporters around this particular issue.

Part of the rightwing schtick around this case has been to falsely claim that the ever-threatening Liberal Media Conspiracy has tried to suppress the story. I notice in this column from one of the older conservative media outlets, The Gosnell Embargo Cracks Human Events 04/12/2013, John Hayward says of the Evil Libruls accomplishment, "The Men in Black could not have erased this story better with their neuralyzers."

On the substance of the accusation against the Evil Librul Media here, Scott Lemeiux writes:

Whether the mainstream national media has given adequate attention to the Gosnell case is a matter of judgment, although claims that it's been entirely ignored are incorrect. (Consider, for example, Sabrina Tavernise's lengthy New York Times story from 2011.) But it should be remembered who hasn't been ignoring the story: feminist writers. Many prominent feminists, for obvious reasons, reacted with horror to the charges against Gosnell.

That second link in Lemeiux's quote is to Irin Carmon, There is no Gosnell coverup Salon 04/12/2013.

But I also wanted to call attention to the description DeVega gives of how white racism operates in real life in his post on the Gosnell case:

There are volumes of research in the Social Sciences which have repeatedly demonstrated that race is an important variable in news coverage of crime (people of color are grossly over-represented as criminals; whites are grossly under-represented). Race also impacts how individuals quite literally "see" and understand events, as well as judge human social interaction.

In tests measuring implicit bias and sub-conscious racism, harmless objects held by black men are magically transformed into dangerous objects such as guns and knives when viewed by white test takers. This has real life and death consequences: police routinely murder innocent people of color because they claim to have seen a cellphone, a wallet, or house keys as deadly weapons.

Psychologists also conducted experiments where they showed test takers pictures of Tony Blair and Barack Obama. The former, then British Prime Minister, and white, was judged to be "American." Obama, the country's first black president, was seen as a "foreigner."

In the collective (white) American subconscious, "whiteness" equals belonging; "non-whiteness" is a mark of outsider status, of being a perennial Other and anti-citizen--even if you are President of the United States.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, kermit gosnell, white racism