NYT Looks at the Political Exploitation of White Supremacism–but Not Too Hard

The New York Times (7/13/16) had a piece headlined “For Whites Sensing Decline, Donald Trump Unleashes Words of Resistance.” As FAIR contributing analyst Adam Johnson put it on Twitter (7/13/16), “NYT editors had a bet to see who could find the most convoluted way of saying ‘Trump panders to racists.'”

“Trump Mines Grievances of Whites Who Feel Lost” was the headline in the print edition (7/14/16), and that euphemistic tone continued through the piece, written by the Times‘ Nicholas Confessore; “racial conservatives” is the term it uses to characterize people who believe that, for example, “blacks suffer greater poverty because of…lack of effort.” The goal of white supremacists is, in the Times‘ own language, “that race should matter as much to white people as it does to everyone else.”

But there is also valuable information here on the extent to which ideological white supremacists have embraced the Trump campaign, recognizing the candidate as a kindred spirit. “He is bringing identity politics for white people into the public sphere in a way no one has,” says one far-right activist. The Times documents how Trump, in turn, makes organized racists feel welcome in his movement, sometimes indirectly; the article notes, for instance, that analysis of Trump’s Twitter activity found that “almost 30 percent of the accounts Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular self-identified white nationalist accounts.”

The article attempts to provide insight into how modern-day racists negotiate the contemporary racial terrain. But this is hard to do, given that the Times along with other establishment media outlets are a crucial part of that terrain.

Take the article’s observations about America’s shifting racial scapegoats. Confessore writes:

While open racism against blacks remains among the most powerful taboos in American politics, Americans feel more free expressing worries about illegal immigrants and dislike of Islam, survey research shows.

This, the Times suggests, is what fuels the “birther” fantasy (which Trump used to thrust himself to the front of the conservative movement) that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim: As one of the paper’s sources puts it, “It is a catchall for expressing ethnocentric opposition to Obama, without saying you’re against him because he’s black.”

But why is it that white Americans feel more free to express Islamophobia and xenophobia than anti-black bigotry? Surely this has much to do with the fact that in recent years powerful media outlets have done much to legitimize the former biases. The press’s use of “terrorism” as synonymous with “violence committed by Muslims” (FAIR Media Advisory, 4/15/14) has cemented the idea of Islam as a threat in the minds of millions. Media insistence on the term “illegal immigrant”—a usage championed by the Times (4/23/13)—has literally criminalized millions of people.

And it’s not as if open anti-black racism has ever gone away in the United States—or even been denied a prominent place in the media hierarchy. For years, the nation’s No. 1 radio talkshow host has been Rush Limbaugh—a bigot who once told a black caller, “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back” (FAIR.org, 6/7/00).

The Times also exaggerates the degree to which Trump is a break from rather than an extension of recent conservative history in his flirtation with white supremacism. After all, Ronald Reagan, the right’s great hero, kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign by proclaiming “I believe in state’s rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi—a county best known for the murders of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney 16 years earlier in 1964.

Discussing Trump’s coy reaction to endorsements from hate-group leaders, Confessore wrote:

Modern political convention dictates that candidates receiving such embraces instantly and publicly spurn them. In 2008, when it was revealed that a minister who endorsed the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, had made anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim remarks, Mr. McCain forcefully repudiated them.

Mr. Trump did something different.

Actually, that’s not what McCain did when he was endorsed by hatemongering preacher John Hagee (Extra! Update, 4/08). What he actually did was say that Hagee “supports what I stand for and believe in,” though “that does not mean that I endorse everything that he stands for and believes in”—and that he was “proud” of Hagee’s spiritual leadership as a pastor (AP, 3/1/08). It was a week later that complaints from Catholic groups, and observations that Catholics were an important voting bloc in crucial swing states, prompted McCain to say that he “categorically reject[ed] and repudiate[d] any statement that was made that was anti-Catholic”—without saying that he regretted soliciting Hagee’s support in the first place (Boston Globe, 3/8/08).

The real story—of McCain and the Hagee endorsement, and of hate in America in general—is less flattering to the political establishment that the New York Times identifies with and protects.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

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