Tom Bethell has an insightful piece in the American Spectator that raises some important points about a debate that, if it is framed honestly, dares not speak its name in the elite media. Excerpt:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks about America were the worst things said about my adopted country since I came here from England in 1962. Louis Farrakhan and Malcolm X are not in the same league as this champion of race hatred from Chicago. Imagine if Senator John McCain had for years been a member of a church where a white pastor said that blacks should go back to Africa where they came from. And McCain were to respond: Well, I disagree with his remarks and I reject what he said but I won’t disassociate myself from him, because he has been so important to my life. McCain would be out of the race in the blink of an eye. Yet Obama has not felt the need to distance himself from Pastor Wright.

The New York Times has praised Obama’s speech as a “profile in courage.” That is baloney — reflecting the gross double standard that has prevailed for decades on the subject of race. The underlying problem is that the liberals who still control so much of the debate quietly agree with much of what Wright said….I just read a mealy-mouthed article by the Washington Post’s Dan Balz (”Will the Answer Outlive the Questions?“). He quoted three “Democratic analysts” who point out that Wright’s comments could hurt Obama in November. What was significant was that not one of these analysts went on the record. This shows that we do indeed need a debate about race. The real problem is that it’s the liberals who don’t want to debate it, probably because they know they would lose.

Prediction: This Obama episode will once more show how the new technology is transforming political debate. Balz conveyed in his piece that the Washington Post will be good soldiers and won’t do anything more than absolutely necessary to upset the race industry, of which the Post is a part. But how could the web and the blogs and e-mail be controlled? That’s what bothered Dan Balz. “The danger,” he wrote, as though he were already on the Obama team, “is that what might last are the images of his Chicago pastor — edited and reedited into television ads, YouTube videos and an endless stream of e-mails delivered quietly into the computers of millions of Americans.”

Bethell says: “The underlying problem is that the liberals who still control so much of the debate quietly agree with much of what Wright said”. That may be true, but we think the problem may be even worse than that.

We think that, when confronted by an issue like the Wright comments, many in the elite halls of the MSM experience a combination of fear and condescension that they do not even appreciate consciously. Instead, this toxic brew falsely presents itself to them as a feeling of sensitivity to someone’s plight. It masks itself as something nice, but it is not. In fact, it is itself a kind of nasty bias. Of course this is a feeling that it would be very hard for such a reporter or editor to acknowledge and confront directly. The same sentiment was evident in the self-censorship of the elite media in the cartoon controversy three years ago. The media sometimes note in passing the strange or scary or aberrant behavior by members of certain groups, like the Cartoon Riots, or the Wright statements, but, depending upon the group, they’d just as soon leave the matter alone as quickly as possible.

In an example used by Bethell, Nick Kristof wrote in a recent piece “it has been shocking to hear Mr. Wright suggest that the AIDS virus was released as a deliberate government plot to kill black people. That may be an absurd view in white circles, but a 1990 survey found that 30 percent of African-Americans believed this was at least plausible.” Kristof then went on to catalogue other items where blacks and whites thought differently, in the same kind of “on the one hand, on the other hand” way. (In some ways that is also what Senator Obama did in his speech the other day.) Regarding Kristof’s two-handed approach, isn’t the media’s problem this: if 30% of people believe something nutty, shouldn’t we start the discussion by calling that belief nutty, and take things from there?

Until the elite media are willing to see clearly and condemn nutty or destructive behavior or beliefs of groups that elicit the MSM’s inappropriate emotional reaction, an open debate cannot take place — at least any debate hosted by the elite media. Some sort of debate will continue to take place of course; it will just for the most part not include those parts of the media establishment. It is of note that in two recent examples of such debates — the Dubai ports deal and the immigration reform fiasco — the elite media’s view was 180 degrees out of phase with the vast majority of Americans. It is our guess that the matter of Reverend Wright is similar in some ways to these two other examples. Time will tell if that is the case.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, New Media, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.