This post originally appeared on ProPublica.
On May 14, The Daily Caller, a popular conservative website, published a news story about recent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. Led by prominent white supremacists and anti-Semites, the protesters, some carrying the battle flag of the Confederacy, expressed their anger over the city’s plans to remove a large monument to Robert E. Lee.
The article noted that some 200 people had carried torches in a march to the monument, a procession it called “visually striking.” It also quoted a young black man speaking favorably about one of the protest’s organizers.
The story, it turned out, also carried some critical omissions: It didn’t disclose that its author, Jason Kessler, is supportive of white supremacist groups, and on the day of the march had himself made a speech to the protesters in which he praised fascist and racist organizations, thanked a prominent Holocaust denier, and declared the beginnings of a cultural “civil war.”
ProPublica contacted Kessler after the article’s publication. In the course of an extended interview, Kessler said he saw efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy as part of a broader attack on white people who, in his view, face an “existential crisis.”
“White people are rapidly becoming a minority in the U.S. and Europe,” he said, adding that he resented the country having to take in immigrants and refugees. “If we’re not able to advocate for ourselves we may go extinct.”
ProPublica also contacted The Daily Caller. Widely read in right-wing circles — the site gets nearly 10 million unique visitors per month, according to Quantcast — The Daily Caller was co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, who served as editor-in-chief until late last year when he took a prime-time job at Fox News. Carlson, who hosts a nightly show in the time slot that once belonged to Bill O’Reilly, remains co-owner of the site. Like Breitbart News, The Daily Caller has found an audience by posting a constant stream of punchy news stories, some of them imbued with racial overtones.
Within hours of being contacted by a ProPublica reporter, The Daily Caller appended an editor’s note to the article and severed its ties with Kessler. The editor’s note states, “The author notified The Daily Caller after publication that he spoke at a luncheon May 14 on behalf of an effort to preserve the monument.”
“The story is factually accurate and plainly states what happened at the event,” said Paul Conner, executive editor of The Daily Caller. “But in light of his activism on the issue, we have mutually agreed to suspend our freelance relationship with him.”
Asked about the substance of Kessler’s speech in Charlottesville, Conner offered no comment on Kessler’s statements. In an email, he said only, “We pay writers for journalism, not their opinions.”
The debate around Civil War monuments has become one of the many flashpoints at a racially volatile moment in the country’s history. In recent years, public officials throughout the South have sought to vanquish symbols of the Confederacy: In 2015, South Carolina took down the confederate flag that had long flown over the state capitol; more recently, New Orleans removed three statues of rebel war leaders that had dotted the city’s landscape, as well as a tall stone obelisk commemorating a Reconstruction-era uprising led by the White League, a racist militia.
In a speech that gained national attention, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu argued that the statues had originally been erected in an effort to “rebrand” the Confederate cause. “These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said.
The Daily Caller has followed these developments closely, and its readers seem to appreciate the coverage. Kessler’s story generated 146 comments, many expressing support for the Confederate monuments, some openly hostile towards African Americans. A May 20 piece on an Alabama Senate bill that would preserve the monuments in that state spurred nearly 130,000 shares on Facebook, as well as a lengthy chain of comments, a large number of them lauding Alabama lawmakers for their stance.
The event in Charlottesville included an appearance by Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, a white nationalist organization. Kessler quoted Spencer in the article, which chiefly portrayed the protest as a pushback against “left-wing ideologues who want to tear down statues, change the names of buildings and rewrite history books to place white people in an unsympathetic and even hostile light.”
Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
comments powered by HyperComments
Loading ...