The New Black Panther Story: Light on Facts, Heavy on Echo

[sufrommich]

Last week, I found myself in the crosshairs of conservative ire because a news analysis I wrote didn’t take the allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party story as seriously as conservatives felt it should.

According to the more sensational takes circulating in conservative media and legal circles, the story goes this way: two imposing black men, one with a billy club, stood outside a Philadelphia polling station on Election Day 2008 and scared off voters. The Bush administration had every intention of prosecuting these men to the fullest extent of the law, but when the Obama administration took over, it quickly dropped the charges, letting the men off from what should have been an open-and-shut case. Why? Because liberals in the department have an avowed policy of not prosecuting cases with white plaintiffs and black defendants.

Here’s the rub: the most serious claims in that narrative come from one man, former Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams, who joined the department in 2005 and quit in protest over the handling of the New Black Panthers case in June 2010. No other corroborating evidence has been found, and no other whistle-blowers with direct knowledge have come forward to support Adams's claims. Since Fox News's Bill O’Reilly complained that I didn’t “know what was doing,” I figured I’d go straight to the source and talk to Adams himself to discuss his allegations.
.........
By summer 2009, the Commission on Civil Rights—a bipartisan, independent body not affiliated with the Justice Department, whose members are appointed by the president, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the speaker of the House—had begun looking into the case, and commissioners formally voted to open an investigation in September 2009. Things didn’t truly blow open, however, until Adams’s June 4 resignation. Writing for the conservative site Pajamas Media shortly after, he wrote, “The Department has repeatedly claimed the ‘facts and law’ did not support the case—which of course is false. Others have speculated about a White House involvement. But I believe the best explanation for the corrupt dismissal of the case is the profound hostility by the Obama Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department towards a race-neutral enforcement of civil rights laws.” Testifying on July 6 before the Commission on Civil Rights, Adams said his colleagues repeatedly complained about having to enforce the law in cases, particularly in the Deep South, where blacks were accused of discriminating against whites. All told, Adams has written six items for Pajamas on the topic, as well as items on his own site. And he's taken star turns on Kelly’s Fox News program.

The problem with Adams’s claims is that they’re not independently verifiable: those who believe Justice has a systematic bias are those who believe him, while the skeptics are those who either don’t believe Adams or would like to see further evidence.

Take, for example, Adams's assertion that “of course” the Justice Department had a strong case. In sworn testimony and elsewhere, Justice officials have pointed out that since the law in question, section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, came into force in 1965, there have been only three successful prosecutions, given that, as Assistant Attorney General Tom Perez put it, “the standards for proof are high.” In his testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights , Adams also suggested that there were “indications” that the New Black Panthers had pulled similar stunts elsewhere, although he hasn’t offered any evidence for that, nor has anyone else.

In the meantime, coverage of the New Black Panther case on Fox News and in other right-wing outlets is a classic example of a media echo chamber. But journalism it ain't.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/23/the-new-black-panther-story-light-on-facts-heavy-on-echo.html