Hyper leftists’ panties in a knot over Fox News.
Yesterday, John Stossel took to the air on Fox News to defend the right to discriminatebased on race. Yes, you just read that correctly. On Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show, FoxNews employee John Stossel said:
“Private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won’t won’t ever go to a placethat’s racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I’ll speak against them. But itshould be their right to be racist.”
Stossel is only the latest in a long line of Fox News personalities to divide Americaalong racial lines, and it needs to stop. We need to send a message loud and clear –first to Fox, and if it’s unwilling to listen, to the sponsors who support it:
But Stossel didn’t just argue for the right to discriminate. He went a step further,suggesting the “public accommodations” section of the Civil Rights Act should berepealed, thus allowing businesses to practice racial discrimination. This is thesection of the law that prohibits a lunch counter from refusing to serveAfrican-Americans — a practice which was commonplace when the law was passed.
The government, Stossel says, should be protecting the rights of businesses that wantto discriminate — not the rights of minorities facing pervasive discrimination.
This isn’t the first time a Fox personality has treaded the line on race. Fox Newsoperates under the direction of President Roger Ailes, a longtime political operativewith a history of race-baiting and racially inflammatory campaign tactics. Glenn Beck,one of Fox’s top-rated hosts, has repeatedly called both Barack Obama and SoniaSotomayor “racists” who dislike white people and white culture, and hosts Sean Hannityand Bill O’Reilly have also stoked racial insensitivity with on air-comments.
It’s not just the hosts: In just the past week, Fox has also provided a platform forthe extremist anti-immigrant group Americans for Immigration Control, which has beenlinked to white nationalist groups and drawn fire from the Anti-Defamation League andthe Southern Poverty Law Center for their anti-Latino rhetoric.
Now Stossel is adding to Fox’s record of questionable rhetoric on race. At some point,this stops being a question about individual hosts or guests — and starts to be aquestion about the whole network.
It’s time for Fox News to be held accountable for the racially charged statements andracial insensitivity that it continually allows on the air.
http://mediamatters.org/action/stosselrtd/?src=stosselrtd (with video)