Chasing the phony New Black Panther mirage, the conservative movement is now wallowing in the kind of unapologetic race-baiting that mainstream American politics hasn't seen in decades, if not generations.
But the press pretends otherwise.
Fox News (aka the Opposition Party) openly and proudly engages in jaw-dropping episodes of demagogic race-bating, as they depict the president of the United States as a hater of white people who's quietly assembling his progressive army for a "race war," yet the press sits quietly, watching from a distance, and decides uniformly that there's no story there.
You can practically hear the audible justifications: "Well, it's just Fox being Fox." Or, "It's just Rush being Rush."
I'm sorry, but when the most-watched cable news channel relentlessly depicts the president and his administration as being the home to get-whitey racists, it's news. And having the most listened-to radio talk show host in American claim that our first African-American president purposefully keeps the unemployment rate high in order to exact revenge against white America -- that's news too.
Period.
What Fox News, Limbaugh and the rest of the GOP Noise Machine are doing today in terms of unapologetic race-bating is a disgrace. How the press is handling the unfolding story isn't much better.
Read the full Media Matters column, here.