Opinion
The Race War is On at Fox News
“Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now”
B ERNIE F OSTER
Founder/Publisher
B OBBIE D ORE F OSTER
Executive Editor
T ED B ANKS
Advertising Manager
J ERRY F OSTER
Account Executive
L ISA L OVING
News Editor
H ELEN S ILVIS
Multimedia Editor
D AVID K IDD
Graphic Designer
M ONICA J. F OSTER
Seattle Office Coordinator
J ULIE K EEFE
S USAN F RIED
Photographers
The Skanner Newspaper, established
in October 1975, is a weekly publica-
tion, published each Wednesday by
IMM Publications Inc.,
415 N. Killingsworth St.,
P.O. Box 5455, Portland, OR 97228.
I
n 2013, race still mattered –
especially at Fox News.
According to MediaMatters,
the watchdog group, last year was
a banner period for race-baiting at
Fox.
“Viewers who spent 2013
absorbed in Fox News might be
under the impression that an all-
out race war has erupted across the
nation this year, thanks to the net-
work’s coverage of everything
from voter fraud to Santa Claus
echoing one common theme:
white folks are being victimized in
Obama’s America,” an analysis of
coverage on the network conclud-
ed.
The review showed that Fox, the
nation’s top-rated cable network
with 1.76 million daily viewers,
routinely exploited racial fears to
boost its ratings.
“Fox became obsessed with
black crime rates in the summer of
2013, when Floridian George
Zimmerman went on trial for the
2012 murder of African-American
teenager Trayvon Martin, whom
Zimmerman shot and killed while
he was walking home from a con-
venience store. Zimmerman, iden-
tified as white Hispanic, alleged
that he shot Martin in self-defense,
and was not subsequently arrested
or charged with any crime until a
significant public outcry made the
story national news,” MediaMat-
ters noted.
“Fox immediately began run-
ning defense for Zimmerman in
what became a red meat story for
the network – an opportunity to
justify right-wing gun culture and
stand your ground laws, stoke
fears about the dangers of black
youth, and paint white-on-black
crime as exceedingly rare and usu-
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Page 4 The Portland Skanner January 8, 2014
T HE C URRY
R EPORT
George E.
Curry
ally justified while black crime is
exploding.”
When Fox wasn’t fear monger-
ing about Black crime, the report
stated, it was supporting voter ID
laws that suppress the African-
American vote.
“2013 marked a unique year
with regard to free and fair elec-
tions in the United States. In June,
lican-controlled state legislatures
to continue pushing through voter
ID laws, a movement purporting
to fight voter fraud that in fact dis-
enfranchises Democratic voting
blocs, particularly minorities, by
imposing stringent prerequisites
to vote that many older and
minority voters cannot easily
meet. Previously, such measures –
in states with a history of disen-
franchising minorities – required
approval from the Justice Depart-
ment before being implemented.”
The report noted that the Voting
Rights Act’s preclearance provi-
sion had been invoked more than
700 times between 1982 and 2006
to prevent racially discriminatory
voting proposals to go into effect.
“Perhaps the one story that best
At Fox News 2013 was a banner year
for race-baiting
the conservative bloc of the U.S.
Supreme Court disregarded histo-
ry, legal precedent, and congres-
sional intent in a 5-4 Shelby
County decision that gutted the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).
Weeks later, thousands of Ameri-
cans gathered with civil rights
leaders in the nation’s capital to
commemorate the 50th anniver-
sary of the March on Washington
– a 1963 march that featured Mar-
tin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a
dream” speech and helped lead to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
aforementioned VRA,” the analy-
sis recounted.
“The summer’s Shelby County
decision paved the way for Repub-
encapsulates the way Fox News
goes out of its way to paint a dis-
torted image of the crossroads of
race and crime in America, it’s the
network’s coverage of the so-
called ‘knockout game,’” the
report explained. “Fox described
the knockout game as a violent
and spreading trend primarily
involving black youths assaulting
unsuspecting and primarily white
victims on the street for recreation.
The network has run numerous
segments on the alleged craze, and
Fox’s Greta Van Susteren has ded-
icated a recurring segment to the
phenomenon.
In fact, as the report states, “A
New York Times piece on the
knockout game cited police offi-
cials in several cities where attacks
have been reported who concluded
that the game ‘amounted to little
more than an urban myth, and that
the attacks in question might be
nothing more than the sort of ran-
dom assaults that have always
occurred.’”
Fox even played the race card
with Santa Claus.
“Fox capped a year decorated
with race-baiting overtones and
racial dog whistles with a compa-
rably absurd ornament for the top
of their tree: New Fox megastar
Megyn Kelly’s unabashed declara-
tion (“for the kids at home”) that
Santa Claus is white,” MediaMat-
ters recounted.
“’Santa just is white,’” Kelly
told viewers in response to a Slate
column by Aisha Harris, an
African-American who noted that
depictions of a Caucasian Santa
Claus can have an alienating effect
on minority children. Conserva-
tive media rushed to agree with
Kelly’s assertion, most notably
Fox race-baiter-in-chief Bill
O’Reilly, who concurred that
‘Miss Kelly is correct. Santa was a
white person.’”
The report stated, “Sadly, the
Santa story illustrated how harm-
ful race-baiting media coverage
can be. Amidst the back and forth
over the race of Old St. Nick, a
teacher at Cleveland High School
in New Mexico reportedly told a
black student that he should not be
dressed up as Santa because he
was the wrong skin color…”
George E. Curry, former editor-
in-chief of Emerge magazine, is
editor-in-chief of the National
Newspaper Publishers Associa-
tion News Service.