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July 22, 2016

One of the indelible lessons of the past sixty years of broadcast media’s dominance of our lives is that there is no “dialoguing” with bigotry. Haters and extremists are beyond the reach of reason and argumentation. TV or radio hosts who attempt to engage with bigots—as opposed to exposing them via good journalism—invariably get exploited and used. Haters have no qualms about lying and have learned to soft pedal their rank bigotry to appeal to even a small segment of the viewing audience.

Mercifully, it isn’t often that the extremists gain access to an audience of millions, but when they do it’s usually bad news; it’s the exceptional case where the “interrogator” does his/her homework. Even rarer is the host who publicly acknowledges that they have been had.

Last year, Michael Smerconish, an able and intelligent reporter, had “>CNN broadcast. The proffered reason was to determine whether a sitting congressman, Steve Scalise, met with a group headed by Duke during the course of his election campaign in Louisiana. That was likely not the real reason since in the first couple minutes of the interview Duke made clear that he had been in Russia when the group’s meeting took place and didn’t know if Scalise ever showed up. (A producer could have determined if Duke had anything probative to say in the first thirty seconds of a call to invite him on air.) 

Smerconish, who is no shrinking violet, thought he could take on and expose Duke, but it didn’t work.

When “confronted” with his Ku Klux Klan leadership past, Duke simply proclaimed, “I was never violent….I never supported white supremacy.” Reams of material from Klan publications and interviews and exposes from his decades of rabble rousing belie that claim. Yet he convincingly (in the face of little resistance—Smerconish kept calling him “David”) made and compared his Klan past to that of the late Sen. Robert Byrd who, in his youth in West Virginia, joined the Klan. If Byrd became “respectable’” why couldn’t he?

Of course, Byrd didn’t make a forty year career out of racist and anti-Semitic hate mongering, Duke has. Smerconish allowed Duke to peddle the vile nonsense that he was just an activist for “preserving white rights and heritage” with his European Unity and Rights Organization (““> this).

Bigots and extremists simply can’t be nailed down, they will misrepresent and say whatever they think will be most effective in reaching even a small fraction of the audience they know is on the other side of the camera. Unless hosts have their videos and facts lined up, the haters will peddle what they can sell.

This week, during the Republican National Convention, we were reminded again of the lure of bigots to TV news hosts and what a dangerous game it is to allow them access to the airwaves.

“>Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of “Black Lawyers for Justice”. Shabazz was on to discuss his comments the day earlier that he could understand why some people are hailing the recent Baton Rouge police killer as a “hero”. 

Kelly attempted to interrogate Shabazz about his view on whites, police, the American system, Jews, Israelis, etc. In each instance the response was evasive or untrue. For example, in response to the question, “do you believe that white people are inherently evil?” —–“I believe that your policies and actions are evil, they result in us being killed…”

One didn’t have to be a fortune teller to know that Shabazz would seek to use his platform to spout his line; his twenty year history of hate is “> “Fifty shots! Fifty cops! Kill the pigs who kill our kids

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