It doesn’t surprise me that Blacks don’t watch Fox. 95% of Blacks voted for Obama and probably over 90% register and vote Democratic.

First–and less important–you’re missing the point. The point is that the numbers are seriously skewed–not just a bit, but by a whole lot. Which means that Fox is not just reporting, they are not “fair and balanced,” they are instead propagandizing, expressing a strongly biased viewpoint, and in this case, one with commonly racist overtones. A certain number of people will turn off a news channel if they don’t like the news they hear, but 95%, en masse? That’s more than just ‘hearing news you don’t like.’

Second, and much more to the point, your reply places the onus of disproportionate viewership on the black audience, as if it is their bias which is the controlling factor; clearly it is not. It is, instead, what is seen and heard on Fox is highly offensive to that group, and not just because they bash Obama all the time.

If CNN ranted 24/7 about how white conservatives are lazy and corrupt and stupid and dishonest, and attacked people whom white conservatives respect without just cause, how many white conservatives would watch that? And would it be because they mostly voted for Bush?

Now, if Fox were simply reporting fairly, honestly, and without bias, and was reporting an uncomfortable truth about a group or its leaders, then, as I said, some would turn it off–but not 95%. Even the 95% who are a certain political stripe and who voted for someone the network is presenting bad news about.

In this case, the onus is not on the audience which is alienated, it is on the people who alienate that audience.

Nowadays, calling someone or something racist is basically the lowest form of personal attack. It immediately puts the other person on the defensive and it’s almost impossible to prove that you *aren’t*, especially if a “minority” is making the charge.

Heh. Been watching “The Daily Show” lately? They covered that as well.

Ok, fair enough–labeling someone or something as “racist” unbalances the argument. But it only does so improperly if the label is incorrectly or too quickly applied.

So the next question is, is that label incorrectly applied to Fox News coverage, and how do you judge that?

This may not sound fair, but unless you’ve been the victim of racism, it is very easy to be blind to it, and less easy to make informed judgments about how most people affected by racism view the same broadcast you’re watching. You may think you know about racism, understand it, and see how often it actually happens, but unless it’s pointed at you, it’s not likely that you see it for what it is, not even close. As a Hispanic (primarily by name) in the SF Bay Area, I never encountered any racism I could detect, and knew little of it or how it might work. After coming to Japan in the 1980’s, however, I encountered it a lot. More than 19 out of 20 landlords told me they would not rent to non-Japanese. I was shouted at upon entering a restaurant for being a white person, and told to leave. A video rental shop refused to give me a membership card and sent me packing. I was stopped many, many times by the police for walking-, bicycling-, or driving-while-white, accused of being an illegal or having stolen my transportation. Japanese people would be nervous around me, some clearly afraid. I even had a little girl stare at me, and when I smiled at her and said “Hi,” she ran off screaming, “foreigners are scary!!!”

A lot of this was also apparent in the media. It was not hard to see bias on Japanese TV. Foreigners were often presented as violent criminals or disease carriers. News stories were slanted, especially in sports, where foreign players were resented, sometimes intentionally injured during play, were stopped from breaking records solely on the basis of their race, and were slandered in the media as violent. TV dramas turned stories about troubled Japanese people in America shown sympathy and respect into stories about heroic Japanese people violently attacked and punished by prejudiced Americans. And so on and so on.

My Japanese friends were blind to it, but it grated badly on me. For example, in baseball–I had seen the actual stats which showed that foreign players were responsible for less than their share of violence on the field (only a few percent of the total), and chiefly that was in the form of rushing the pitcher when Japanese pitchers intentionally hit them with pitches (foreign players were the power hitters of the time, resented by Japanese pitchers, who assumed that brush-backs and beaning were simply accepted American techniques and so applied them to foreign players wildly out of proportion). In contrast, acts of violence by Japanese were far more numerous and usually even more violent in nature, especially by coaches, who sometimes went as far as landing blows on umpires. But then I’d see a TV sports show which showed a clip reel of 20 fights on the field–19 of which were foreigners taking out Japanese pitchers, and the last clip being a Japanese coach shouting angrily and nothing more. Cut to the announcer, sagely noting that “Japanese also get violent sometimes too.” A Japanese person, unaware of the realities, would simply see foreigners as the violent ones, and would accept the announcer’s words as humility in face of the the overwhelming ‘evidence’ to the contrary. As a foreigner, it burned, sharply, to see crap like that.

On the street, cops would stop me on my bike, repeatedly, and accuse me of stealing it. I saw other foreigners treated like this, but rarely (only once in all my years) a Japanese. Once I was stopped and then surrounded by several cops with a patrol car added to the scene, while they diligently checked the serial number within the frame and called it in to see if I hadn’t stolen it. As they did, I noticed Japanese passers-by looking without staring, undoubtedly thinking, “so it’s true about foreigners and crime.” To become a poster boy for defamatory, discriminatory stereotypes like that made me angry as hell, especially as I knew that non-immigration crimes amongst foreigners in Japan were even lower than the rates among Japanese. But any Japanese person, especially the ones who saw me that day, would not see racism or discrimination or stereotypes, but simply an affirmation of perceptions they deemed right and reasonable. After years of this kind of thing, I saw what was happening in the US in a very different light.

Tell me, if you send out a resume and don’t get a callback, what do you assume? If you’re a white male, probably that you didn’t measure up to other candidates. A study by the University of Chicago found that resumes with equal qualifications but particularly black-sounding names (Latisha and Jemal, for example) got callbacks significantly less than did resumes with white-sounding names (like Emily and Greg). A white person would probably not even think about that, nor would they likely suspect anything if they looked into an apartment listing and were told it had already been taken. Minorities who experience stuff like this far more often, knowing that many times it’s a race thing, tend to be much more aware. And though I suffered discrimination in Japan, at least it was outright–imagine knowing that you’re being discriminated against that often, but it’s hardly ever overt–as a result, you end up questioning every missed apartment or job opportunity.

And then you turn on Fox News and hear white people talking about America being post-racial, color-blind, and it’s the NAACP and liberals who are the real racists. Acts of racism against minorities are rarely mentioned, but “reverse racism” is abundant and blacks are mooching off of whites. You see people who are regulars on Fox like Mark Williams write letters like his one mocking the NAACP, saying blacks were lazy parasites who want slavery re-instituted so they can all get wide-screen color TVs with the money taxed from hard-working white people. And hey, look at this dangerous radical Black Panther movement, and how dare those A-Rabs build a mosque within a mile of Ground Zero, and look at this racist black woman talking to the racist NAACP, while conservatives are more often reasonable and how dare you even insinuate that they’re racist!!! Unfair!!!

Sure, if race is not really a part of the argument and I call you a racist, then you get bogged down in proving you’re not, it’s an unfair tactic. But Fox? Especially lately? What does it take to be able to lay a charge of possible racist overtones on their part and not be criticized for playing the race card unjustly?

I would not be so quick to claim that Fox has fewer black viewers because they’re all Obama fans who don’t want to hear anything bad about the guy. I betcha they have a lot more negative to say about Obama than most white liberals and independents.

Like I said in the post, maybe Fox looks racist simply because they want to attack any Democratic constituency and minorities just happen to be one. Nevertheless, they do say a lot of crap which has racist undercurrents, and have lots of ‘commentators’ with backgrounds even worse.

Maybe the best way to put it is, “Fox News may not be racist, but it plays one on TV.”