Corporate media not interested in reporting on the violent far right —
even when their crimes are international news.
By
Shortly before the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” vote, the shocking
murder of Jo Cox — a member of parliament and a vocal Remain supporter —
exposed the racist roots of elements in the victorious Leave campaign.
That much you may have heard.
What you might not have heard about were the suspect’s ties to a
neo-Nazi organization based here in the United States. Accused shooter Thomas
Mair, The Washington Post reported, “was a longtime
supporter of the National Alliance, a once-prominent white supremacist group.”
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Post explained, “Mair bought a manual from
the organization that included instructions on how to build a pistol.” Cox, it
adds, “was shot by a weapon that witnesses described as either homemade
or antique.”
The National Alliance was founded in 1974 by William Pierce. The
group was a reorganization of the National Youth Alliance, which was itself an
outgrowth of an organization that supported the 1968 presidential campaign
of segregationist George Wallace.
Pierce turned the group, in the words of the SPLC, into “the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi
formation in America.”
While head of the National Alliance, Pierce published The
Turner Diaries, a novel that gleefully imagines a guerrilla race war and
the mass murder of Jews, gays, and interracial couples.
A chapter that depicts
the bombing of an FBI building helped inspire Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of
a government building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.
When he was arrested, McVeigh had photocopied pages of the novel with him in his car. And phone records revealed that McVeigh had called a National Alliance number seven times the day before the bombing.
In the days after, feverish speculation abounded that the attack
might’ve been the work of international Islamic terrorists. Yet once it became
clear that domestic right-wing extremists were responsible, journalists seemed
to lose interest. Few spent any time examining the National Alliance
connection.
Yet the group turned up in another more recent terrorism story,
when Kevin Harpham planted a bomb filled with shrapnel and rat
poison at the 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane. Harpham, a
one-time National Alliance member, is currently serving a 32-year prison
sentence for the attempted bombing.
If you don’t remember this story, that’s probably because it got
very little coverage. It was mentioned only three times on
the nightly news in the 10 weeks that followed.
By comparison, the much less sophisticated “Times Square bomb,”
which failed to go off a year earlier, got 49 mentions in the same time frame.
It’s a classic example of how the U.S. corporate media treats acts of political
violence by Muslims as inherently more newsworthy than
others.
In fact, some corporate media outlets have allowed their
personalities to promote the National Alliance directly. Bob Grant, a popular
and influential radio talk show host who broadcasts on WABC in New York —
the flagship of the ABC radio network — frequently let
callers promote the
group on his show, saying he didn’t “have any problem” with it.
Grant was eventually fired by Disney, which was then WABC‘s
owner, for gloating over
the death of Commerce
Secretary Ron Brown, who was African-American. But even then, his connection to
the neo-Nazi National Alliance didn’t become an issue.
This lack of curiosity about the influence of the violent far
right is a long tradition in U.S. corporate media. Even the murder of Jo Cox, a
member of parliament campaigning in a closely watched vote, seems unlikely to
change that.
Jim Naureckas is the
editor of FAIR.org, where an earlier version of this op-ed appeared.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.