I hadn’t hear much about about the murder of Brisenia Flores and her father until ED’s and mistermix’s posts. That’s no accident, it hasn’t received a lot of media coverage. Neither is the news about the attempted bombing in Spokane.
Over the past few years, we’ve had one major dust-up over two black guys in Philadelphia dressing in “traditional Black Panther garb” and another about the fact Obama has a met a guy who used to be in the Weathermen. I guess the idea is that the political violence of the 60s, often associated with the left (rightly or wrongly) was so awful that we can never forget it, which is strange given that we are ignoring similar levels of political violence, generally associated with the right, today (see Digby).
I realize times have changed, that national media is more diffuse, that nothing as cinematic as the Patty Hearst kidnapping has taken place yet. But it’s still amazing that so many journalists (Joe Klein, for example) is looking for black panthers under his bed, while cheerfully shrugging off today’s political violence as isolated incidents.
ruemara
If it doesn’t threaten white persons, it’s not news. SATSQ
Redshift
@ruemara: Not so simple, actually. What about the attempted bombing in Spokane? Yes, it was an MLK parade, but there’s plenty of footage of nice white people in the parade.
DougJ DougJson
@ruemara:
Along these lines, all the assassinations of civil rights leaders are remembered much less than the Weathermen, etc., in the political consciousness.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
American blindness to the persistence of right-wing violence is a feature, not a bug.
Maude
@ruemara:
Most of the media is white, isn’t it? That would explain a lot.
mistermix
That Spokane bombing had warfarin (blood thinning rat poison) in it so the shrapnel would cause the victims to bleed more profusely. It really is the stuff of cable TV, and I’m surprised it isn’t getting more play.
cyntax
Digby has been top notch in compiling the list of right wing violence and trying to keep it from disappearing down the memory hole. But the lack of interest on the part of the Joe Klein’s of the world is–as we’ve noted in the uncivil parts of blogistan–a feature, not a bug. Still, other than harassing our galtian “journalists” with these facts that don’t fit the prescribed narrative, I don’t think there’s much we can do.
Kryptik
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
This. Unless the victim is a major public figure (at which point it’s hard to simply sweep under the rug), then as long as you’re the right kind of victim, no one will care enough to make a story of it. The Floreses and the MLK bombing attempt don’t matter nationally, since they’re the ‘right’ kind of victims. The Black Panthers ‘victimized’ sensitive white folks who think Black Racism against Whites is more pernicious and widespread than White Racism against Blacks.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Can we now dispense with the shaky idea that our major news media don’t have a right wing bias, rather they are merely chasing after sensation?
Because there are plenty of sensational stories about right wing violence and intimidation based on the implied violence available for any so-called journalist who wants to chase them, and yet nothing. Apparently “if it bleeds it leads” doesn’t apply to victims of the right, or even to anybody crazy who might be even loosely associated with the right when all the facts come out. Better to bury those stories on page D37.
ruemara
@DougJ DougJson:
You’re looking through the lens of history and pop culture, when your initial post addressed the “why are we not addressing this glaring thing” aspect. If this had been an attack that mostly harmed white persons, particularly of note ones like say, an elected official, it’s news. Think about it. 2 black guys who are dressed as loonies, acting loonie but not crazy disruptive enough to even be removed from the premises are national news and a bogieman to fairly respected journopundits. 2 crazy right wing nutjobs burst into the house of a latino family, murder the father and the child with all deliberation, almost finish the job on the mother and we hear crickets from the press.
@Redshift:
I don’t want to negate your point, but 1. many bigots assume that an MLK Day parade will draw out persons of colour.
2. and their supporters, who are just as bad. Race traitors, you see.
Zifnab
They get dragged around by the nose with their editors who get dragged around by the office heads. Investigative journalism is well and truly dead in the major media markets. Everyone just sticks to the script set out by a handful of major movers, like Drudge and Roger Ailes.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Klein is completely obvious to the would-be bombing in Spokane or the Flores case.
fasteddie9318
@ruemara:
I’d look at it from the other direction; if blacks or Latinos aren’t either acting as the aggressor or somehow related to the aggressor, then it’s just plain not violence. Some white people tried to blow up a parade? Whatever. A couple other white folks massacred a Latino family? Big whoop. But a couple of black dudes dressed up and looked menacing, or a black dude was acquainted with some guy who did something bad 40 years before he met that black guy? HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS TERRIFYING! WHEN WILL THE VIOLENCE STOP AND WILL I HAVE ANY CLEAN UNDERPANTS LEFT WHEN IT DOES?????
geg6
IOKIYAR.
Duh.
Cris
@Maude: Most of the country is white.
cyntax
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Considering how long and how hard the right worked to embed that idea, I doubt we’ll ever root it out. Once these sorts of frames take hold (to mix metaphors), they’re hard to dislodge. And we don’t have the think tanks and message unity of the right so…
Anne Laurie
Don’t know if you remember the rogue researchers on the X-Files who called themselves the Lone Gunmen, but that’s been the double-edged “joke” on the left since (at least) 1963: You could have a squadron of ninjas in boldly labelled ATB uniforms gun down a classroom full of kindergartners live on Fox News’ best multiple-camera set, and it would still be attributed to “lone gunmen”. If you’re a patriotic member of the Village Media, it’s always ‘a lone gunmen’, no matter how many there are or how organized they are… or who’s paying for their “hobbies”.
Wile E. Quixote
Can we bust a cap in David Horowitz’s ass? He used to hang around with the Black Panthers and was an admitted communist who went from being a Stalinist to a Maoist. Sure, he claims to have changed, but isn’t that just what you’d expect one of them to say?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cyntax:
We could start with rooting out the idea right here on this blog. The sensationalist media explanation for editorial bias in the MSM makes a regular appearance in comments ’round these parts. Time to kill that memezombie.
Moonbatman
I remember the Epic Stupid whining Faux Noise Wingnut Butthurt swiftboating of Persecuted Political Prisoner and Social Justice Warrior Steven Hayes for what he did to the rich Fatcat Petit family while the police waited for a half an hour.
Unlike the violence promoted by Glenn Beck, this violence is justified by the economy being in the tank, millions of people out of work, the record profits on Wall Street, the oppression of the Poor by the Rich getting richer and increasing income disparity.
Peace out. The power is yours.
Mnemosyne
In other news, the “bomb” delivered to Sen. John Cornyn’s office turned out to be a box of videotapes.
But it’s still going to be constantly referred to by wingnuts as proof that “both sides do it.’
fourmorewars
Bill Ayers was referenced in the post, and it prompts me to ask that anybody here who ever hears from a rightwing friend about Obama’s nefarious ties to him, PLEASE remind them how they met. Under the auspices of the Annenberg Foundation. Founded by, and named for, the man who hosted Ronald Reagan AT HIS HOME ALMOST EVERY NEW YEARS EVE, EVEN WHEN REAGAN WAS PRESIDENT.
And tell Glen Beck to put that up on his fucking Blackboard Conspiracy Tree.
MattR
@Mnemosyne: Seeing as how the box was blown up by authorities as a precaution, it would be so ironic if those videotapes were the only copy of evidence that proved that Obama was born in Kenya.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Cris: Not for much longer! Hence the increasingly desperate violence.
Chris
This. Shame for Brisenia Flores and her father that they weren’t killed by Muslims – they’d be national martyrs by now with their own little monument on the way. Strange that a failed bombing and a failed underpants-lighting-endeavor on an airplane were plastered with so much attention when the very successful murder of these two Latinos by militia psychos went completely unreported.
I hadn’t even heard of this incident until this morning, either. Oh American media, you SO liberal and biased…
fasteddie9318
@Mnemosyne: Jeebus, I hope Senator Cornyn makes back up copies of his porn stash.
Chris
@Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion:
It sure seems that way, especially when things are getting so out of hand in Arizona that “moderate” Republicans have actually resigned in fear for their lives – and it’s not the leftie liberals who scared them into that.
Why would the Real Americans denounce these guys? They’re doing their work for them.
Mattminus
If the little Mexican’t had shown some initiative and been blonde haired and blue-eyed, she’d be wall to wall on CNN.
But, typical for liberals, you want to blame everyone else for the failings of a minority.
cyntax
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Oh, for sure. Creating a counter narrative is an important first step, but we’ll have to be really persistent too.
The thing that might really help is when this country’s demographics shift away from a white majority.
RossInDetroit
@cyntax
FTFY
Jeanne ringland
@Redshift: There’s lots of coverage in the state of Washington. It might have gotten a lot more national coverage if the thing had gone off, but last night’s revelation that the stuff had been mixed with an anticoagulant should make everyone’s radar go off.
Sorry, mistermix already covered the anticoagulant.
Albatrossity
@mistermix: Interesting. But since warfarin (aka coumadin) takes several doses over several days to affect the blood-clotting process, it really wouldn’t have had much effect on bleeding in any victims.
Which really makes it even more amazing that the news outlets haven’t picked up on this story very much; they usually jump on any chance to pass along bogus information about science!
Chris
@cyntax:
Potential complication with that is the ever-changing definition of “white.” I read an article in Newsweek a while ago in which the author opined that Latinos wouldn’t turn the country nonwhite; rather, the definition of “white” would change to include them, or a greater number of them.
There’s precedent. A lot of white supremacist groups today cheerfully accept Irish, Italian, Polish etc members united by their hate for the eebil blacks and Latinos. No way in hell that would’ve happened a hundred years ago… but now, it’s perfectly normal.
Jeanne ringland
@Kryptik: The Los Angeles Times is covering the trial, and ran an article about the case in yesterday’s paper.
I don’t want to think that my letter requesting they cover it was the only reason, I hope they are covering it because it is important.
They also ran a column yesterday that laughed at the Fox News poll following the SOTU, calling it Faux Science.
Ed Marshall
The media doesn’t care about right-wing violence, because it’s a dog-bites-man story. That’s the scariest part. Until they go the full McVeigh it’s not worth covering.
Elia
I think this is one of those instances where we can rely on the easiest answer — the one that takes a small amount of thinking and reasoning to arrive at:
Journos in the corporate media are terrified of being called liberal, and all the more so since the wingnuts went on offensive defense post-tucson.
David in NY
@fourmorewars: Oh, they can handle the Annenberg Foundation. You see, the Foundation seems to have adopted the principles of Ayers, not Annenberg.
At least that was what I gathered from the first few sentences of a nutcase site in which the author argued that Loughner was a disciple of Ayers and Obama because he attended a school that received funding from Ayers’s Annenberg Foudation.”
I know, just shoot me, OK?
bemused
It’s pretty obvious that no big media, not just Newscorp, wants to focus on domestic terrorism. I’m willing to bet that most of our republican neighbors, family have never heard the names Brisenia Flores or Shawna Forde or that the Spokane bomb contained rat poison ingredients or much about any of the other numerous tragedies or averted tragedies involving homegrown radicalized people.
Why does big media spend the minimum amount of time reporting on what should be huge, important events? There is a lot of discussion of why they won’t go there in the blogosphere and not so big media but none of that really nails down the answer(s), imo.
catclub
@MattR: What a sneaky way of getting the ‘Whitey Tape’ destroyed!
jayjaybear
@fasteddie9318:
As opposed to Thomas Friedman’s porn ‘stache…
Anniecat45
Actually there was a wire service story on the Forde trial yesterday, read it in my local paper. I have not yet read today’s paper so I don’t know if the coverage continues.
gwangung
Well, here’s something else you’re not hearing about: racist death threats against Asians.
Geez. I thought we were honorary whites. Fersure, I thought we’d get some coverage….
DougJ DougJson
@ruemara:
I agree with you.
polyorchnid octopunch
@mistermix: I’m not.
grandpajohn
Because they are instructed not to, and they know if they want to keep their jobs and place in line for the cocktail weenies circuit, they better damn sure do as instructed
Wile E. Quixote
@mistermix:
That was a plot element in the Long Way Back episode of Burn Notice. The IRA terrorist is trying to kill Fiona, and who killed her sister, made bombs with an anti-coagulant rat poison in them so the victims would bleed out faster. I wonder if the bomber got the idea from watching this episode.
PhoenixRising
@Cris: Not for long.
Think that might be part of the problem.
bemused
@grandpajohn:
Producers and those above them decide which stories and memes the flapping mouths will chew on but that still doesn’t get to what exactly is driving those decisions. I hear ratings, not sexy enough, political/money motivations, etc but that still doesn’t answer my question of how not reporting more than they have to on domestic terrorism benefits big media. I don’t mean the thought that keeping the media in rightwing territory is good for their pocketbooks. I guess I’m asking for the nearly impossible, some insider knowledge with specific examples of deliberate decisions to downplay these stories to get direct benefits.
tomvox1
Um…what?
Chaney, Schwerner, & Goodman.
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.
Medgar Evers.
Bloody Sunday in Selma.
MLK.
Kent State.
Chicago, 1968 (but I guess that was really the DFH’s fault).
And on and on…
I mean, shit, man–the Weathermen? Really?!? But maybe because they fucked with the establishment and the powerful, they are somehow more violent than the fascists on the right who murdered and beat black kids and segregationists and peaceniks in order to “defend America”…
Mitch
Even in the 60s, most political violence was directed at the left, and the perpetrators were right-wingers or the forces of law and order. Think of Schwerner Chaney and Goodman, the Birmingham church bombing, Kent State, Jackson State, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, the Chicago Democratic Convention, and many other incidents that never made it into the papers.
It’s true that lefties weren’t perfectly non-violent, and there was a lot of militant posturing that seems funny or regrettable in retrospect; but almost all the violence aimed to damage property, not people.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Then ya oughta be reading Neiwert more often. He’s been covering this at C&L from the git go.
Zach
I hadn’t heard anything about this till now. You’re also forgetting the attempted assassinations (what else do you call sending a mail bomb?) of Janet Napolitano, Martin O’Malley, and the MD transportation secretary that occurred a few days before the Giffords shooting.
You can make more direct links between Sarah Palin and anti-abortion terrorism (in that the folks linked to Palin are still linked to terrorism) than you can between Obama and the Weathermen. Sarah Palin endorsed a Freshman Rep who was Operation Rescue’s spokeswoman at a time when the organization spawned several bombings and welcomed members who said bombings were morally justified.
histrogeek
Memory in this country is a funny thing. Talk about 1960s violence and people think urban riots or Panthers or Weathermen or SLA, even though the last two didn’t even exist until the 1970s.
On the other hand, people often ignore Bombingham, the near-anarchy at Ole Miss, the murder of civil rights workers, assaults on Freedom Riders etc. Sure a few cases are still remembered, but they are rarely talked about with the same urgency as the national media talks about the riots or Panthers. They seem to be more an old anachronism, barely more recent than slavery, while the dirty leftists are a modern threat.
asiangrrlMN
@gwangung: Well, we are, until we do shit that people don’t like–then it’s back to the land of the colored people for us!
gwangung
@asiangrrlMN: Well, dang, hope these people be consistent–how will we know how to behave?
fasteddie9318
@Zach:
I call them mere child’s play compared with the heinous, hate-filled act of sending a box of VCR tapes to John Cornyn, that’s what I call them.
Delia
Here’s another one you don’t hear a lot about: Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, the father-son white supremacists, who planted a bomb near a bank in a little town outside Portland back in December 2008. They were afraid Obama was going to take away their guns. Two policemen were killed trying to defuse the bomb and another one lost a leg. They were just sentenced to death. In their trials they mainly blamed each other and the dead policemen.
Robert Waldmann
as you suggest, the right was more violent than the left also in the 60s. You know the Klan and all that.
The Weatherpersons never killed anyone except for themselves.
Wile E. Quixote
@Delia:
Shit. I live in Seattle and I don’t recall ever hearing about that. Two cops killed by a terrorist bomb and another one crippled it’s not newsworthy because the bomb was placed by a couple of deranged white fucksticks but some deranged muslim fuckstick sets his underwear on fire and it’s on the news for weeks. White conservative terrorists get a pass in the press.
Chris
@histrogeek:
This (just in case anyone’s still reading).
From the history I’ve read, terrorism in the fifties and sixties was mostly white supremacist. Not just in the U.S; the Algerian war spawned the OAS in France, and if I looked a bit more I’m sure I could find other examples.
Left wing terrorism tended to be more in the seventies and eighties. Even then, when I look at the actual history, I’m surprised at how little blood they shed, especially in contrast to how much we hype them today. Seems to me like the lone wolves of the last two years alone have killed as many people as the Weathermen did.
Joel
@Delia: Here’s the thing about cases like that:
A lot of people have relatives or know someone, or are friends of friends of someone who may just be like one of those depraved assholes. That’s terrifying for most people to think about, so they’d rather not.
I’m not saying it’s the right thing to do, but it’s the natural approach.
pattonbt
White racist based murders only get national news if they are really sensational (like the pickup truck dragging death of a black man in Texas a while back – sorry my google fu is weak).
Everyone has pretty much already said this but most national journalists/news producers/consumers are white and white on “other” crime kind of falls into that “we (whites) aren’t really like that, and while awful and it happens, we really don’t think it is indicative of a problem because my white friends and I would find such an event horrible and never ever do such a thing, so it’s not really something that needs to be writ large, best noted as a local issue anomaly and swept under the rug. We surely aren’t like that, just want to reiterate that again. Those ‘others’, though, you know, sometimes I could see how a white guy could get confused. I mean we do have (made up problem X – illegal immigration, terrorists) so I could see how someone (white guy) could make an honest mistake, I mean, (problem X) is really, really bad (to our continued domination of the country’s power structure) so it really is just an isolated incident and definitely not something we condone even though ‘the other’ is a bit scary and maybe had it coming, and maybe not that victim in particular but some victim like them. I could see how it could happen. Honest mistake as nasty as it might be, but not worth dwelling on because of (problem x).”.
And thus the story gets no air.
Hank Essay
I think we would all have better credibility on the threats on non-white folks if some of us got up in arms loudly about the on-going violent carnage happening in our cities every day. I live in Oakland, CA and it has simply been a bloodbath since the new year..just killing after killing…black-on-black, latino-on-latino…and most of the progressives around here just shrug their shoulders and stay silent…we can’t have it both ways…maybe I’m just frustrated….
jjcomet
“but almost all the violence aimed to damage property, not people. ”
To the right wing, property damage is the greater crime, as they affirm every day…