How Fox News silenced Obama on race
This article originally appeared on Media Matters.
The lament has spread all across the media spectrum this week, as the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri unfolds and people search for answers to the police killing of unarmed teen Michael Brown.
Obama Should Go To Ferguson, Pronto, urged a Businessweek headline, beseeching the president to fill a leadership vacuum on the ground in Missouri. Obama, cant you see black anger in Ferguson? asked Marc Lamont Hill in a CNN essay. Writing at Daily Beast, Stuart Stevens lamented that Obama had lost faith in his voice in Ferguson; that he was increasingly uncomfortable with the role of healer-in-chief, while theWashington Posts Joel Achenbach urged Obama to give another national address on race because thats what the crisis demands.
Maureen Dowds New York Times column todays mocks Obama as a the most ordinary of men with a bored-bird-in-a-gilded-cage attitude who is unwilling to engage with the issue of racial strife.
Most of the of the do-something commentary has adopted the same premise: Obama could help the Ferguson crisis by giving a speech about race or addressing the situation more forcefully, but he wont. He wont use his powers. (See: The Green Lantern theory that Obama could convince a recalcitrant GOP Congress to pass legislation if he only tried.)
That premise though, and most of the commentary, completely ignores the corrosive role of the right-wing media in America, how it has spent years trying to silence and intimidate Obama on the topic of race, and how its used some of the most offensive, guttural rhetoric and personal attacks to do so.
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/21/how_fox_news_silenced_obama_on_race_partner/
I do not understand how limballs can still be on the air.....he's just horrible with his attacks on POTUS