Fox Deliberately Distorts DOJ Action on New Black Panthers Voting Incident
Hot on their success bringing down ACORN using false reporting and deceptive video editing, the Republican Party propagandists at Fox News are ginning up outrage among their viewers by deliberately misreporting the outcome of Department of Justice investigation into a purported voter intimidation incident on Election Day in 2008.
In its coverage of the DOJ response to a complaint against three members of the New Black Panther Party, an insignificant fringe group unrelated to the Black Panthers activist organization in the 1960s, Fox on-air personalities made the false claim that no sanctions were levied against the NBPP thugs and and lied again by stating that there was no precedent for the DOJ’s handling of the event.
The lies are demonstrably deliberate because, in the same segment, the Fox personalities quoted other sections from testimony by a DOJ official involved in the case in which both the DOJ sanction against NBP and the precedent case were discussed.
As with its trumped up case against ACORN — a nationwide nonprofit group that focused on housing for the poor as well as voter registration, and so was on the Republicans’ hit list for years — by distorting the facts, Fox is attempting to gin up racist resentment among its viewers, purporting that the African-American thugs were given a pass by the DOJ because both Pres. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are black.
Conversely, a much clearer case of overt preferential treatment based on race can be made in the precedent incident. In 2006, in Arizona, members of the Minutemen, a white supremacist, anti-immigrant militia-style group showed up at a predominantly Latino polling station brandishing a 9mm Glock automatic and bullying voters. The U.S. congressman from the district, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, a Democrat, was among the voters who were subjected to heckling by the hooligans that day.





