Fair and balanced terrorism
by digby
Eric Boehlert wrote about Fox News’ self-serving definition of what constitutes “terrorism” and what doesn’t:
And Media Matters has also been shining a spotlight on the fact that not only does Fox News downplay homegrown acts of right-wing, anti-government and white supremacist violence, treating them as rogue, isolated events (if covering the events at all), they also hype beyond proportion and common sense attacks by Muslims in America.
That attack mode allows Fox to accuse President Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terror. (Obama’s administration is too “politically correct.”) It also lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminatingother Constitutional rights. Recall that it was on Fox that viewers were told, “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Right-wing violence? Fox News doesn’t recognize a clear and present danger.
That double standard was on display this week when Megyn Kelly devoted almost her entire Fox News program Wednesday night to an interview with Traci Johnson, who was attacked last year by a co-worker at Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma. The attacker was Alton Nolen who had been recently been fired over racial comments. Nolen then went home and retrieved a large kitchen knife. He returned to the workplace and began attacking his former co-workers. He beheaded one woman and injured Johnson before he was shot by a company official. Nolen later confessed to the attack.
Fox News immediately led the right-wing charge to declare the Vaughan Foods attack to be an act of ISIS-like terror. (Nolen was a recent convert to Islam.) Devoting an extraordinary amount of TV time to wildly hyping the crime, Fox hosts like Kelly and Sean Hannity created special programming to cover the story. (i.e. “Terror In The Heartland.”)
But in the end, law enforcement found no evidence that Alton’s killing was terror-related, and labeled the killing a workplace attack. Appearing on Fox News after the attack, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that, while Nolen “was looking at the extremist ideology,” “there is no evidence at this point that he was directed by a terrorist organization to do what he did or that that was the principle motivating factor.” The FBI also found no links to terrorism.
Yet there was Kelly this week – months after the crimes — speaking over ominous background music and once again suggesting the Moore, Oklahoma attack had been the product of “radicalized” terror. In other words, Fox has been reduced to creating incidents of Islamic terror in the United States, while at the same time Fox plays down glaring examples of deadly right-wing violence.
The steady pattern of those political attacks may be one reason the Department of Homeland Security this yearissued an intelligence report warning about the rising right-wing terror threat. Fox News immediately objected, with host Eric Bolling insisting there hadn’t been any recent examples of homegrown terror to justify the government’s warning. Co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed, claiming liberals can only name two far-right terrorist events ”over four decades.”
Seriously?
(He goes on list a whole bunch of them …)
This is sick. But as I found out when I wrote this piece about right wing extremism, it is an article of faith on the right that “right wing terrorism/violence/extremism” is a myth perpetuated by liberals. You can see where they get that idea.
This is Fox News’ Roger Ailes, not just Alex Jones or Michael Savage. They pretty much say that it doesn’t exist but if it did it wouldn’t be terrorism, it would be “patriotism.”
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