The MSM starts a "race war"

An extraordinary article, Playing Telephone with MLK, in the Columbia Journal Review traces the genesis of the narrative that Democratic Presidential candidates have been playing "the race card", potentially "fracturing" the party. Turns out the MSM started shuffling and dealing "the race card" as early as possible in "the game."

The political press, this past week, engaged in an epic game of Telephone: hear the whisper, spread the word. It started last Monday, when Hillary Clinton was interviewed on Fox News and, trying to highlight her experience working within that labyrinth known as Washington, noted that it took a president—LBJ—to codify the work of MLK.

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And now—despite last night’s truce between Obama and Clinton—the Democratic party may be broken. Or so some in the press are saying. NPR news analyst Juan Williams talked about the possibility of the MLK-legacy dispute leading to a “fractured Democratic party” on today’s Morning Edition; The Washington Post’s The Trail blog used the same term last night; the Christian Science Monitor declared that, “in going negative with Obama, something else is at stake: the next generation of Democrats”; Newsday, announcing yesterday evening’s truce, noted the “growing signs” that the leading contenders’ fight for the Democratic nomination is splintering their party; The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet headlined her “racial tension” analysis with: “They try to cool things off, but race talk shakes up campaign.”

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it’s both baffling and troubling that the media reached these points of Meta-Speculation via a single, and generally innocuous, comment. The evolution—from comment to story to intra-party fight to bigger story to intra-media fight to even bigger story to what-does-it-all-mean analysis—reveals a lot about the makeup of campaign coverage, from id to superego: its quick-fire nature; its viral makeup; its tendency to love a good dogfight even more than it loves a good horserace.


Here’s the Clintonian Comment in Question, and in full:

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do; presidents before had not even tried. But it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said ‘We’re going to do it’ and actually got it accomplished.”

In that context, it’s clear that Clinton’s comment had nothing to do with race.

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Let’s leave aside the questionable logic that to acknowledge Johnson’s role in the civil rights movement is to diminish Dr. King’s. Instead, let’s go back to the game of Telephone—and, specifically, its most basic law: that, when the first person to hear and spread the word misinterprets that word, there’s no recovering. The “Clinton diminishing Dr. King’s role” narrative caught on, with her words—taken out of context—used to reinforce it.

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The whole affair, more than anything else, is incredibly sad. The two leading candidates of the party that, right now, seems to have the momentum going into the national election will, whoever wins the nomination, make history. We should be thrilled. We should be proud. But the past week’s “racial overtones” coverage reminds us that, however much our political universe has progressed, our media universe is still often one of ‘(sound) bite first, ask questions later.’

Race will NOT fall off the MSM radar, and most assuredly NOT by the Republican Party spin machine and echo chambers. Having introduced "the race card" into the primary, and furthered it along with non-stop sound bite loops of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, it is assured that the Republicans will frame African-Americans as the racists, the Democratic party as the party of racial divide, and in the process hope to dissuade enough disgusted Democrats from voting in the election as well as to inspire voters who hate and/or fear African-Americans to get out and vote.

A strategy:

Claim one candidate is racist.

Show the other candidate's pastor making racist comments about whites and America.

Subtext: both candidates are racist, ergo, the party is racist.

Claim very early on the the race issue is dividing one party.

Continue the strategy of successful voter suppression in urban areas -- voter ID's, minimize the number of voting booths, change the location of the polling places.

Keep stoking the racist story-line in the print headlines and fueling the idea on the political gas bag talking heads shows.

Spin McCain as Maverick.

Watch McCain win.

A strategy worthy of Attwater / Rove? Projection onto the other party all of your own party's worst impulses.

Doubtful, not impossible. More likely it is the media's simple:

tendency to love a good dogfight even more than it loves a good horserace.