Media Bias
The Maoists of #Ferguson: Why the Media Blackout?
/27 Comments/in Featured Articles, Media Bias/by Hubert CollinsOut of all the photos I have seen of the protests, looting, arson, etc. regarding the recent decision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson, by far the most interesting ones are those featuring Maoists.
No, that was not a typo. In fact it was a very precise descriptor: Maoists, while being Communists, are a specific type of Communist; as their name implies, they are the variety of Communists that particularly admire Mao Zedong, as opposed to Lenin, Trotsky, etc. While not exactly numerous, there are some Maoists in the United States, and they come out in full force in the latest protests sweeping the nation.
They look like regular protesters, I know, but they have little giveaways that are easy to spot once you know a bit more about them. The easiest giveaway is the URL “revcom.us”, which is the website of the Maoist group, Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Since Conservatism Inc. throws around the slur “Communist” on a fairly regular basis, I fear I might be coming off as a bit hyperbolic by calling these people Communists, so allow me to list a few of the RCP’s beliefs to show that I am not bloviating:
- The RCP is headed by a man named Bob Avakian, whose memoir is called “From Ike to Mao and Beyond”
- In one of their party documents, “The Communist Revolution and the REAL Path to Emancipation: Its History and Our Future,” one of their chief theoreticians, Raymond Lotta, manages to champion Stalin, hold up Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” as a shining example for the world to imitate, and advocate a “new synthesis” on how to advance the world to glories even greater than those achieved by Mao and Stalin.
- They also openly call for a revolution in the United States, although are fairly mum about what exactly this would entail, likely for legal reasons
Exploring their website is a wonderland of insanity, perhaps you fine readers could check it out yourselves and post in the comments the zaniest things you can find (my vote is for their claim that “slow genocide” against blacks in Latinos is being committed in the US). What is of course important to remember, is that the RCP is doing its best to advertise their website on the occasion of all this #Ferguson unpleasantness, which is why the URL is always splashed across their banners, posters, etc:
Another giveaway that you are looking at RCPers is their t-shirts. Again, you need to know what to look for to spot anything, so let’s take a look at some of their products on their Zazzle page:
Unfortunately, the Zazzle page is a bit out of date, and their website does not seem to have an “apparel” section. However, an immigration restrictionist blogger took some excellent shots of RCP t-shirts at a May Day rally two years ago:
There are several constants you can find in all, or almost all, of the clothing: the word “revolution” in yellow/orange, the phrase “revolution, nothing less”, references to “BA” as in “Bob Avakian”, and “the whole damn system is guilty” and “get with the real revolution,” and more often than not, the URL revcom.us. Let’s take another look at some more protesters:
See the “BA Speaks”? Note too the woman in the background with a shirt that has similar lettering and coloring.
Note the “revcom.us” on the banner, and the woman with the fop of blonde hair in the lower left with a “Revolution — Nothing Less” shirt.
For those of you who think I may be “stretching” in assuming what certain apparel says when almost all of the photos leave the matter far from crystal clear, you should explore the revcom.us website once again. Consider how when the RCP released a DVD of Bob Avakian giving a talk, the cover of it read, “BA Speaks: Revolution — Nothing Less” with “Get With It” scrawled along the bottom of the DVD in faux-graffiti style. “Revolution — Nothing Less” is in the same fire-like orange/yellow, as is the word “Revolution” in their official newspaper, which is called “Revolution”. Referencing Bob Avakian as “BA” is very common within the RCP as well, there is even a book they released called BAsics, which is a “greatest hits” compilation of writings by Bob Avakian, and is advertised with the slogan “You can’t change the world if you don’t know the BAsics”.
As you have likely noticed, the RCPers seem more prevalent on the Left Coast generally, and Oakland particularly. Aside from the obvious political reasons for this, the RCP is based in Berkeley as well, and is known to cause trouble during local protests, like five years ago after the shooting of Oscar Grant in San Francisco. Regardless, they certainly get around. Last year they were spotted in Florida to protest the innocent verdict in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin affair, which the Daily Caller made note of briefly, but got the name of the group wrong, claiming they were with the CPUSA instead of the RCP, as their banners proudly made clear. A more talented journalist at the San Francisco Weekly wrote an interesting piece taking a look at the RCP’s attempts to recruit by way of the anti-Zimmerman verdict protests that took place last year — and their attempts to recruit by way of most any protest that is sweeping the nation.
As they have tried so many times in the past, like with Occupy Wall Street, the RCP is now trying to gain new recruits through the latest leftist craze. I would here like to make clear that I am in no way suggesting that the RCP is behind the protests as a whole — there is no evidence for that — or that they will succeed in co-opting the protests. Their numbers are quite small, and every RCPer that I have met (about six) has been over the age of sixty — except one man who was in his forties, and their obvious over-eagerness to talk to young people about “the revolution” is embarrassingly unappealing. They have also been known to alienate even people who might be inclined to join them. When I lived in Chicago I knew several lefties who loathed the RCP because they made a habit of swarming “spoken word” events and shamelessly trying to recruit even during the presentations.
Even within the Marxian left they have numerous enemies. The “International Communist League”, with is Trotskyist instead of Maoist in pedigree, has repeatedly attacked the RCP for (in their opinion) their puritanical anti-sex beliefs, suffering from a “cult of personality” around Bob Avakian, and being homophobic. Other groups have attacked them for being too sympathetic to the Democrats, and even groups as radical as the “Kasama Project”, who support the Maoist rebels in Nepal, have published lengthy attacks on the RCP. In short, the RCP likes to think of itself as a vanguard – but they have not even managed to unite all of the American Maoists under their banner, making them a candidate for what Greg Johnson has called “Vantardism.”
What the RCP’s presence at all of these protests does show, however, is the shocking extent of the left and the dominant media’s double standard. Not one website I pulled these photos from explained by way of captions what the RCP is or what they represent, presumably because it would conflict with the idea that the protests are entirely a spontaneous grass roots movement by Blacks. I have been watching plenty of CNN these last few days as well, and have seen RCPers protesting live, accompanied by live commentary from newscasters who were invariably mute on the topic of the RCP.
How can this be when any conservative with ties to American Renaissance invariably finds himself purged from “respectable” circles, always to the delight and at the behest of the media? The media loves to do guilt-by-association pieces when the want to go after conservative causes, but we don’t see that here.
Not pointing out that apologists for Mao and Stalin are prominently present at protests against supposed “state violence” is a great example of media bias. Let it serve as another reminder that in the name of their egalitarian agenda, they will justify or ignore just about anything.
Ferguson: Media Images in the Service of White Dispossession
/11 Comments/in Africans and African Americans, Featured Articles, Media Bias/by Cooper Sterling“Look, folks, policing is done this way. You may like to live in Santa Monica and have your little wine party in the backyard and drive your Jaguar and do your little barbecue…. Know that the reason you are allowed to do that in the safety of your community is because police Officers go out and they clean up the streets and deal with all the scum that you don’t want to know about….”
—Stacey Koon [former LAPD Sergeant in charge of the Rodney King incident]
Quoted in Lou Cannon, Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD, 430
The two-week spectacle in Ferguson, Missouri, which culminated in the packed funeral of 18-year-old Michael Brown, produced a cascade of predictable volatility. Brown, an unarmed Black male, died August 9, 2014, after Darren Wilson, a White police officer, fired multiple rounds at the 6’4”, 292-pound amateur rapper known as “Big Mike.” (According to the New York Times, “[Brown] collaborated on songs that included lyrics such as ‘My favorite part is when the bodies hit the ground.’”)
As more details emerge, the sequence of events that prompted the shooting offers a plausible explanation for the skewed original narrative of an unarmed Black male targeted by a White police officer. Several eyewitnesses alleged that Brown was cooperative, had his hands up, and was shot from behind.
However, others tell a quite different story. According to forensic reports, Brown was shot from the front, not from behind. The pattern and number of rounds fired suggests that the officer attempted to stop Brown by wounding him. The two shots to Brown’s head may have been the rounds of last resort in the reasonable use of deadly force against a menacing assailant who was rushing at him, particularly given the possibility that the assailant was a large, physically powerful, marijuana-buzzed, man who showed no signs of being subdued by a volley of shots. Newly released audiotape from an amateur video chat of an apartment dweller near the shooting records ten or eleven shots over a 12-second span. This suggests that Wilson may have tried to thwart Brown by intimidating him at first, then wounding him with a volley of shots before unloading two rounds to the head (a series of six shots can be heard with a one- or two-second break followed by a burst of 4 or 5 additional shots). Read more
The Dark Art of Being FAIR
/22 Comments/in Featured Articles, Media Bias/by Henry St. JohnA “national media watch group . . . offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship” is a great idea. And that is how Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) describes itself, which, on the face of that, makes it a welcome initiative.
According to their website, they “work to invigorate the First Amendment by greater diversity in the press and scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints”. Who could object to that?
Certainly, there needs to be greater diversity of opinion in the press, and minority viewpoints are under-represented—unless one considers the viewpoints expressed by mainstream media outlets to be minority ones, a case for which could well be made.
The organization was founded in 1986 by Jeff Cohen, and—certainly in his mind, at least—has been serving the public good ever since. Cohen has had the honour of being mentioned by this website once previously (see here).
Yet, amazingly—and in this they are not alone—their view of media bias is the complete opposite of how readers of this and similar websites experience it. In fact, one would think that the organization inhabits a parallel universe, which is a complete inversion of ours, because, in their opinion, the mainstream media in America is biased in favour of a white, male, Right-wing viewpoint.
Yes, you read that correctly.
When they say “greater diversity in the press”, they mean not opinion, but skin colour. When they say “minority . . . viewpoints”, they mean viewpoints from people with different skin colours. And when they say ‘dissident viewpoints’, they mean, weirdly, progressive ones. Read more
The Manufacture of Fred Phelps
/4 Comments/in Media Bias/by Francis Carr BegbieThe news that Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church fame is on his deathbed has triggered an orgy of ecstatic gloating in the liberal media. Anyone doubting that the left is a movement of hatred should read the loathing that spews out of numerous blog posts and commentaries.
But how did an eccentric Kansas pastor with a tiny congregation become raised up as a hate symbol of the backward White population? The answer is that Fred Phelps was a creation of the liberal media just as boy bands are manufactured by the record industry.
Until 2007 Phelps was just one of dozens if not hundreds of itinerant preachers in the South, and his Westboro Baptist Church has never numbered more than a few supporters, chiefly his family. That the family was eccentric and dysfunctional is hardly in doubt. One son fled the home at 16 to escape his father’s oppression.
Up until ten or so years ago his media high point was when he got some local publicity through a campaign against outdoor public gay sex. Accompanied by a handful of elderly followers and his own family members Phelps caused a mild stir by picketing an outdoor gay pick-up point in a public park in Topeka. Read more
Vladimir Vladimirovich and the Grey Lady
/1 Comment/in Featured Articles, Media Bias/by Robert BonomoBill Keller, editorialist for The NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a strong attack on Vladimir Putin arguing that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially and culturally liberal West”, describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as ‘foreign agents’, expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.”
Keller, who during his tenure as executive editor of The NY Times argued for the invasion of Iraq and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, makes no mention of Moscow’s diplomatic maneuvers that successfully avoided a US military intervention in Syria or the Russian asylum given to Eric Snowden. Keller, who had supported the US intervention in Syria by writing, “but in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility and enlarged tragedy,” also made no mention of Seymour Hersh’s stinging dissection of the Obama administration’s misinformation campaign regarding the sarin attacks in Syria. Hersh’s piece, which drives grave doubts into the case against Assad actually having carried out the attacks, was not published in The New Yorker or in The Washington Post, publications that regularly run his work. Read more
The NRA: Thriving on Media Hatred
/2 Comments/in Featured Articles, Media Bias/by F. Roger Devlin, Ph.D.Review of The National Rifle Association and the Media: The Motivating Force of Negative Coverage by Brian Anse Patrick; 2nd edition, London: Arktos Media, Ltd. 2013
Arktos’s latest offering is a reprint (with a new foreword) of Brian Anse Patrick’s 2002 study of press coverage of the National Rifle Association between 1990 and 1998.
Some background: Well into the 1970s, the NRA was a largely apolitical organization serving the needs of about a million gun hobbyists. Following a 1977 reorganization, it became heavily involved in fighting legal restrictions on gun ownership through its new political action committee, the Institute for Legislative Action. In the years following, and despite public opinion polls revealing 83% support for an assault weapons ban and 90% support for a five-day waiting period for gun purchases, the NRA repeatedly succeeded in stopping, delaying or watering down nearly all proposed federal, state and local firearm restrictions, as well as proposed registration requirements. To this day, writes Prof. Patrick,
any adult citizen with proper identification who walks into virtually any of the thousands of K-mart or Wal-Mart retail stores in the United States, after filling out a federal self-disclosure form and satisfying the criminal history instant-check by telephone, can leave with a semiautomatic .22 caliber rifle and 1000 rounds of ammunition for not much more than $150 cash, check, or charge.
NRA membership has also been increasing steadily, surpassing five million in May 2013. The NRA is now a significant factor in many local, state and federal elections: Pres. Bill Clinton blamed the organization for the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994 and for Vice Pres. Al Gore’s loss of the 2000 presidential election. In short, the NRA is among the most successful interest groups of its kind. Read more