You have to wonder: If this had been the Tea Party, would the news media have made it a bigger deal?
You haven’t heard much about it, certainly, but a nationally prominent Black Lives Matter organizer was arrested last month for human trafficking.
Charles Wade is reportedly facing seven charges, some felonies, for, as one report put it, “allegedly hiring out a 17-year-old girl for sex in College Park, Md.”
Last year, Wade was profiled prominently in a sympathetic report on the organization in the Washington Post — which, at one point, said of Wade’s
charitable works, “It’s been a trying few days.”
It will be a trying few years if convicted: He faces up to 25 years in prison and fines up to $15,000.
The story is noteworthy for its apparent lack of newsworthiness: Again, if this had been a prominent Tea Party activist, you’d be hearing a ton more about it.
But then, that’s not a surprise. When Time magazine named the Tea Party a “Person of the Year” runner-up in 2010, it noted that critics see “some measure of residual racism” in the movement. No real evidence is given.
Yet, the magazine papered over Black Lives Matter’s outrageous and sometimes violent bent. In naming the organization a “Person of the Year” runner-up in 2015, Time ignored the group’s infamous anti-police chant “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.” (A Black Lives Matter spokesman later said on MSNBC that the chant was “more playful than anything.” Right.)
The Time article on BLM used words such as “blossomed” and “clout” and “courage.” As for the devastating criticism of the group, Time took note of it, but couched the very disturbing actions of the group as “a new set of challenges and charges.”
In contrast, the magazine’s supposedly laudatory article on the Tea Party used phrases such as “weepy master of ceremonies” and “Such spectacles were mostly foam, frothing on the surface.”
Bias can be very subtle. This one isn’t.
The article also slyly impugned the motives of the Tea Party — explaining about Tea Party activists that “you can be certain that some folks will conclude that somewhere in that vast daisy chain of (federal) debt, somebody is going to have to pay — and get angry when they realize that somebody is likely to be them.”
That betrays a fathomless ignorance of the Tea Party movement. Folks are worried to death about the debt we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren. And, oh by the way, they’re angry at the immorality of doing it.
Social media site Facebook recently has been dealing with a scandal in which it is alleged to have suppressed news from conservative outlets and on conservative topics.
But as blatant as that bias is, the more dangerous and endemic is the kind showed — almost across the board — in how liberals and conservatives are reported on and written about.
All conservatives want is perspective, proportionality and basic fairness.
Will they ever get it?
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