The "MSM" suckers the Right

The right half of the blogosphere is in trouble now. News is that those reports out of New Orleans during the disaster—you know the ones, rapes of children, indiscriminate killings, the "brutish" populace, the omnipresent "savagery," Blacks, in short, reverting to type—are bogus. I posted one sober second thought here. Now the Right, by and large no longer able to withstand the obvious (although a handful are in denial), are spinning this thing backwards to a fair-thee-well.

The shrieks of betrayal are simply amazing to hear: for haven't these people been telling us for years that the "MSM" (God, how I loathe that smug little acronym), in the grip of "liberal elites," or "the lib-left," or whatnot, lie to us constantly, filter the news, write it their way, etc., etc., ad nauseam? But guess what? When the "MSM" start to throw big greasy chunks of racism in their direction, feeding what festers at the core of their politics, the Right gobbles it all up, regurgitates it, cluck-clucks about it, uses code-words like "entitlement," and, over and under all of their braying, we can hear, at a deafening pitch, the background noise: "We told you so."

The T.V. footage and photographs carried by the MSM has established in the mind of observers world-wide the fact that the relapse into savagery in New Orleans was an African-American phenomenon. --VDare

I'll say it again: If the city of Detroit or Chicago were flooded, there would be the type of looting, raping, violence and savagery we are currently witnessing in New Orleans. If the city of La Jolla or Burlington were flooded, there would not. --Logical Meme

It is solely blacks, not whites, who are engaged in the savage behavior in New Orleans. Second, the fact remains that the non-criminal part of the black population is incapable of getting control of black savagery and incapable of running a civilized society. --View from the Right

I can't watch the footage any longer. I've seen one poor woman who just arrived at the Astrodome look into the camera and say, "God bless you all for helping us." Everyone else looks like a selfish savage with delusions of entitlement. --Relapsed Catholic

And when taking isn't enough (it never is), they devolve into predation and anarchy, abandon the weak, turn upon the innocent and each other - and all in a matter of days. --Small Dead Animals

[T]he criminal freaks in New Orleans… should be eaten by alligators. --Least Loved Bedtime Stories

[New Orleans] entrust[ed] its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome....Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness. --Mark Steyn [Note: "shiftless, lazy Black" meme meets "jungle savage" meme]

But, my goodness, it all proved to be... "overblown." No rapes, no unfettered violence in the Superdome. And the bodies? Where are the bodies? All those raped children with their throats slit? You mean…there was no descent to the jungle norm? No utter abandonment of civilized principles of conduct? As people like myself were arguing all along, with examples?

So now the story simply has to change, and who better to write it than that arch-prig Mark Steyn? "Nobody," he now acknowledges, "got killed by a hooligan in the Superdome. The problem wasn't rape and murder, but the rather more prosaic lack of bathroom facilities." A re-writing, you will quickly note, of his earlier "gang-infested, faecal hell of the Superdome," emphasis now solely on the latter adjective.

Are we in for a bout of principled self-criticism? Not bloody likely. That sort of thing simply doesn't happen in right-wing circles. Too Maoist, perhaps. Instead, why not blame—you guessed it—the media? And not, I'll say, without reason: for the latter picked up every rumour, every little bit of hearsay, every wisp or phrase that validated their preconceived notions about race. Credulous? I’ll say. Incompetent? Ditto. But where's the "left-liberal cabal" theory of the "MSM" now? In fricken tatters, that's where.

Let's take a hard and sober look at the "MSM." Notice, first of all, that the phrase is plural. Secondly, that thousands of people toil in this domain. Thirdly, that news now flies in from all over at the speed of light, in unprecedented volume. Not much time for conspiracy, and far too many people to crowd a boardroom. Is there , however, a kind of group-think, a shared set of assumptions, a reflection of certain interests in evidence in the corporate media? Of course. But to argue that these interests are left-wing is simply fatuous, as the endless racial discourses from New Orleans reveal all too well.

What, then, if anything, has the Right learned from this? Apparently very little, as Steyn's self-serving piece, linked to a whack of right-wing blogs (tail-wag here to Celestial Junk), illustrates. Blame the media. For what? Why—for sucking us in and making us look like, well, racist fools. They were credulous—but so were we. And we're mad as hell about it. That's the real message here.

Meanwhile, life goes on, and virulent racism bubbles away on the Right as usual. Over at Angry's we are treated to an outraged series of comments about four Black youths in Florida who groped schoolgirls and were punished appropriately for it. He treats us to a lusty recrudescence of the "wild Black man attacks white women" meme. "Animals parading as humans," he shrieks, using this anecdote to promote the school voucher system (i.e., segregation). Meanwhile, an eerily similar incident took place right here in Ottawa at about the same time. The boys were sent off to group homes for their crimes. Not a peep out of Angry about this case, although it was right on his doorstep. No "animals" comments. No racial angle to exploit. He had to go all the way to Florida to find that.

Just as the Right and the media went hand-in-hand to New Orleans and found exactly what they were looking for.