After Tennessee fracas, Washington Post slanders GOP as racist
Quin Hillyer
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In a despicable double-sin of journalistic bias and unjustified racial agitation, the Washington Post today exemplified why so many Americans hate, repeat hate, the establishment media. The antipathy is not unreasonable.
The story in today’s Post was a continuation of the overall media freakout about the Tennessee legislature expelling two of its members for leading a raucous protest inside the state House chamber itself, a protest that blocked legislative business.
THE WASHINGTON POST’S GROSS PARTISAN PRACTICE
It is a fact that the two expelled legislators were black. It may be within the bounds of legitimate discourse for opinionated observers to ask if their race somehow added impetus to the severity of the penalty imposed upon them. It is not within the bounds of legitimate journalism to frame a supposedly straight news story in ways indicating not as suggestion, but as fact, that race absolutely was the predominant factor. And it is terrible journalism to frame a story through a partisan lens portraying one party as inherently racially biased.
Yet that’s what the Post’s inexcusable story did, beginning with its outrageously slanted headline. To wit: “Tenn. GOP deepens racial tension after expelling Black lawmakers.”
After two scene-setting paragraphs with a subtext of snideness about Republicans, the article hit stride like this: “Now the Republican supermajority — largely White and male — was set to vote Thursday to expel the lawmakers, overriding the will of thousands of voters in an unprecedented act of retaliation to silence its opponents. Their action risked further scarring a state with a legacy of brutal battles over race and power.”
Then the Post thickly laid on the racial mud: “They were set to make history in a building already steeped in it. The 1859 State Capitol was built by enslaved people, and in 1866, the House expelled members who tried to block citizenship for formerly enslaved people. And [one of the expelled black legislators] himself led a long campaign to remove a bust of an early Ku Klux Klan grand wizard from the building, taken down just in 2021.”
In five paragraphs, you see, the Post was already raising the specter of the Klan and blaming current Republicans for the racist actions of Tennesseans back in 1866 – racists who, the Post somehow failed to mention, actually were Democrats.
It kept getting worse. The next three paragraphs were about race, race, and more race, with more Klan mentions front and center. And on and on the article went in the same vein, with oh-so-sympathetic presentation of quotes from the expelled legislators and others talking about “cotton fields” and “lynching trees.”
Oh, of course the article cited Republican explanations for the expulsions. Those explanations, though, were nowhere near as lengthy as the allegations of racism cited against them, and they usually were presented in ways that cast them as discreditable. And while the headline explicitly laid the “racial tension” at the feet of Republicans, there was only one passing, muted comment giving consideration to the possibility that it was Democrats who were the ones guilty of racializing a situation that wasn’t inherently racial.
There can be no doubt that if the protesters had been in favor of gun rights, trying to stop a legislature from passing gun control legislation, the Post and other media outlets would have excoriated the protesters and any legislators who joined in the unprecedented interruption of legislative proceedings. The Post actually has done so. Whereas the left-wing news organization was fine with Democrats insinuating the Republicans are akin to Klansmen, the Post’s headline just 18 days ago excoriated Republican in Michigan for making outlandish comparisons.
The headline of that Post piece read like this: “Michigan GOP condemned for comparing gun legislation for Nazi seizures.”
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The headlines say it all: No matter what the subject or who is doing the protesting, the GOP gets the blame.
This isn’t real journalism. This is free agitprop for Democrats and the Left. And it’s appalling.