Defending Dixie
The Washington Times has always been conservative and error-prone. Now, it's helping to popularize extremist ideashttp://www.splcenter.org/intelligenceproject/ip-index.htmlThis is a really long article so I hope the mods will allow more than 4 paragraphs.
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Most media outlets depicted the flap over Ashcroft's pro-Dixie sentiments as a side issue, just one more reason why his nomination was controversial. But the nation's “conservative paper of record,” The Washington Times, saw something different. On January 16, 2001, the day Ashcroft began facing his critics in Congress, the Times devoted a chunk of its front page to an unusually long story with a provocative headline: “How the Democrats made loving Dixie a hate crime.”
For a paper with a loyal readership on Capitol Hill, the story, written by assistant national editor Robert Stacy McCain, was nicely timed for maximum impact. But despite the headline, it did not detail a Democratic effort to outlaw Dixie-loving. Instead, it described a growing resistance to Confederate displays and symbols as seen through the eyes of six experts, five of them arch-conservatives with well-established neo-Confederate sympathies. An NAACP representative was also quoted, deep in McCain's story, but his comments were immediately rebutted by Charles Lunsford (see “Hate and Heritage” in this issue's Intelligence Briefs), the neo-Confederate activist who coined the phrase, “heritage, not hate,” and by leftist-turned-rightist David Horowitz (see Center for the Study of Popular Culture in “Into the Mainstream,” also in this issue), who called the NAACP “a defamation and shakedown organization.”
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While the Times made itself must reading for right-wingers, it was also developing a reputation for shoddy journalism. From the start, the Times' front page was studded with scandalous stories bearing catchy headlines and sensational openings that more closely echoed the style of European tabloids than that of large American newspapers. Whether they were taking aim at Democratic politicians like Barney Frank and Bill Clinton, assailing out-of-step conservatives like Sen. John McCain, or slamming “liberal” organizations like the National Education Association and the NAACP, these eye-popping stories often rippled through the rest of the scandal-hungry media - even though some of them were later proven to be slanted, deceptive, or downright false (see “America's Newspaper?”also in this issue).
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Pruden's contribution to the anti-Clinton efforts didn't stop there. Even as he oversaw his paper's wall-to-wall coverage of Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the editor was creating a stir with his own op-ed columns about Clinton - including one that broke the “news” about Bill, Monica and the cigar.
Pruden is also legendary, as an editor, for manipulating headlines and stories to ratchet up their political slant - so much so that Washington Times staffers coined a verb, “Prudenizing,” to describe the tampering that has led some of them to resign in protest.<snip>
An avid poster on Internet discussion groups, McCain has aired strong personal views on these subjects. In December, New York Press media critic Michelangelo Signiorile published some of McCain's contributions to
FreeRepublic.com, written under the pseudonym BurkeCalhounDabney. McCain asserted that the civil rights movement inspired “black criminality” by encouraging people to get arrested at demonstrations. “I am disturbed … by
Jackson's idea that 'breaking white folks' rules' was somehow inherently just,” McCain wrote. “If rules were to be broken merely because they were the work of white folks, then hasn't Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s?”
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Shortly after Signiorile's story appeared, and McCain's extremist views began to circulate around journalistic and political circles, every posting by BurkeCalhounDabney was deleted from FreeRepublic.com.
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