Drive By Media

Racists media people. You have to laugh at the holier then thou people in the media today. Rush calls them the drive by media.

From Patrick McIlheran at the Journal Sentinel.

"Hate speech – brought to you by my profession
By Patrick McIlheran of the Journal Sentinel
Oct. 15, 2009 11:15 a.m.

Here’s what bothers me most about the way Rush Limbaugh has had to bow out of his latest, costliest hobby, that of buying part of an NFL team: It’s the excuse that Limbaugh was too “divisive.”

The group bidding for the St. Louis Rams said it was dropping Limbaugh because the talk show host “complicated” the deal. You can say that: From the least sports-page hack commentator to national political neoplasms such as Jesse Jackson, a segment of America went into hysterics at the thought that the left wing’s chief hate object of the past 20 years would buy a sports team.

It resembled nothing so much as those scandals in Victorian novels revolving around some Jewish character trying to move into polite society, where others would ask, “How could we let that sort into the club?”

The superficial claim was that Limbaugh was racist. The chief evidence offered in more restrained news accounts was that in 2003, he said this on national TV about a quarterback:

“Sorry to say this, I don't think he's been that good from the get-go,” Limbaugh said. “I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team.”

I don’t know whether Donovan McNabb wasn’t that good. I’m not certain that the media was eager to see a black quarterback do well, though the suggestion certainly comports with my profession’s obsessive beliefs about race. It’s not an absurd argument, especially now in light of how the American press by and large wet itself with eagerness to promote another man, the wholly unqualified Barack Obama, largely on account of his being a racial pioneer. Limbaugh said that a quarterback was benefitting from a kind of affirmative action. And? There’s nothing racist about saying that.

So, naturally, commentators had to sex it up. John Hinderaker notes how my profession of journalism, especially CNN, shamelessly repeated made-up quotes slanderously attributed to Limbaugh. Ed Driscoll rounds up the slanders (and the debunking), which included one from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist who, when forced to admit he repeated a fabrication, essentially said it didn’t matter the quote was fake.

Others proceeded similarly: Yesterday, an MSNBC commentator said, “Several NFL players have already said they would not play for Rush because they know he would love to say he owns a plantation full of black men.” They know no such thing, objected the host, to which the commentator, Touré, replied, “They feel it.”

If you say so. The matter of whether Limbaugh actually said the truly racist things attributed, falsely, to him was easier to check, points out the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden. You just have to look beyond Wikipedia:

“The irony is, of course, that the people reporting (Limbaugh's racism) as fact are the same types who are always denouncing bloggers and the internet as forces of evil intent on destroying proper journalism – proper journalism being the kind that involves checking facts. In the case of Rush Limbaugh, however, it seems to be enough that the intention (i.e. to show the talk radio host is a racist) is considered pure.”

The matter really is about hate – the kind that drives sports columnists to repeat falsehoods in big-name newspapers and then say it doesn’t matter. Or that drives MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to blurt eagerly about the idea of “somebody's going to jam a CO2 pellet into (Limbaugh’s) head and he's going to explode like a giant blimp.” Matthews later sort of apologized, though it was a useful glimpse into the mind-set.

The mind-set seems to be this: That if someone says conservative things, he is bad. If he says them long enough or to a large enough audience, he is so bad it’s OK to fantasize about blowing him up or to make up false evidence of racism and to repeat it without even cursory journalistic safeguards.

I’m not worried about Limbaugh – he’s a grown-up and can take it. I catch a little of it myself, via hate e-mails and inchoate rage from lefty commentators on my blog, but it pretty much rolls off. It’s just trash-talk.

What I am worried about is people who don’t comment for a living: Some schmoe who writes an essay for the paper and gets gobsmacked by left-wing vein-poppers calling him names, for instance. That’ll put you off the idea of civic engagement. People who at long last got involved in politics this summer, via tea parties, only to be called racists by no less than Jimmy Carter – what did they do to deserve the utterly baseless hurling of the most potent accusation now available in American society?

What’s happening, from Chris Matthews’ lies to Jimmy Carter’s, is simply the left trying to delegitimize conservatives wherever possible. Everything we say will be branded racist, somehow, and just holding the beliefs we do will be “divisive.”

Divisive screws up your life. It separates you from polite society, which is the point: The left is eager for conservatism to be socially unacceptable. Unable to debate, it slanders. Unable to persuade, it tries to bring back shunning. And they dare call themselves "progressive."" Right On - JSOnline