The Conservative Noise Machine

Here are few countries in the western world where the conservative media is so well oiled and organised as in the US. And there are fewer still where they have such a huge following. Across the Europe, including the most liberal nations like Netherlands, there is no dearth of right-wing, venomous media outlets. However, much as they get the attention of the world press, these publications and visual outlets are basically at the fringes without any real solid following or respect for that matter.
But United States is a different ball-game. Not only does the conservative media have a deep influence there, they have readership and viewership that leaves several mainstream liberal outlets for dead. And that’s where Obama’s problem starts.
To many of the readers here, obnoxious, meaningless, venomous media means Fox News. Well! That at the best is an underestimation. If you venture in the worlds of The Washington Times (do not confuse it with Washington Post), The New York Post, Weekly Standard or crackpots like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News will look like fairy tales. And it is from these quarters that Obama has faced much of the nuisance in his presidential years. And now that he is aspiring for a second term, the viciousness of the attacks have increased.
There is a clear-cut pattern in these attacks. Most of these media outlets have same conservative biases that most of the voters of Republican Party hold. Naturally, the most prominent among those are, LGBT rights, Affirmative Action for African-American, abortion issue, social security for poor and others. In many ways, these media outlets consider president Obama as someone who is propping-up these agendas. Now combine it with the fact that he is an African American and these biases take a completely different form.
It was not like this always. There have been “black” politicians before Obama. But they were too divisive in their approach to have any substantial hold among the whites. Someone like Jesse Jackson inadvertently served the Conservative cause by being too divisive.
In stark contrast to that, Obama was always considered as a “racial bargainer”. The phrase was first coined and publicly used by writer-journalist Shelby Steele. Steele maintained that “Bargainers make a deal with white Americans that gives whites the benefit of the doubt: I will not rub America’s history of racism in your face, if you will not hold my race against me. Especially in our era of political correctness, whites are inevitably grateful for this bargain that spares them the shame of America’s racist past. They respond to bargainers with gratitude, warmth, and even affection. This ‘gratitude factor’ can bring the black bargainer great popularity. Oprah Winfrey is the most visible bargainer in America before Obama emerged on the scene.”
But this comes with an expiry tag. It is like Muslim superstars or presidents in India. We’ll love you till the time you are apolitical. The day you start asking for the rights for the Muslims, we’ll lynch you on the internet, in comment sections, on social media. And Obama broke that shameful truce.
Take a look at how the Conservative media reacted to this. Peter Wehner in his column in the Commentary Magazine wrote: “Ten days after President Obama took office, I offered four predictions, the first of which was this one: while Obama is riding high, race relations will be excellent. But once Obama goes down in the polls and he does things that elicit criticism, be prepared for the ‘race card’ to be played. If it is, then race relations could be set back, because the charges will be so transparently false. If race was used by Obamacons against Bill Clinton, it will certainly be used against Republicans.” Clearly, the writer thinks that it is not Conservatives but Barack Obama who is playing the ‘race card’. As mentioned earlier, they will spare you only till you hold to that truce.
There is another aspect that has attached itself to this discourse lately. That is Obama’s approval for a possible legalisation of same-sex marriages. It has loosened a volley of abuse and often confusing criticism. The conservative pundits are not yet sure whether to criticise this move outright and risk whatever little support they can get from this community by focusing on the narrative that a-black-president-hell-bent-on-pushing-US-towards-decadent-culture” or prove that he is merely a hypocrite and does not feel for LGBT rights.
Consider this. Jed Baddin, while writing for The American Spectator, pooh-poohs Obama’s move: “Obama’s admission of the obvious fact he’d previously denied – his support for same-sex marriage – is now being ballyhooed as proof of his great political courage. Really? Obama’s position on gay marriage didn’t evolve: it revolved. In 1996, Obama said he was for it. In the 2008 campaign, he said he opposed it but also opposed the California referendum banning it. Now he says he supports gay marriage. Instantly, that became the biggest media story of the week, second only to the story about Mitt Romney bullying a presumed homosexual who attended the same exclusive prep school Romney did in the 1960s. The two stories are entirely instructive, as is the media’s timing.”
Even innocent looking steps that are obviously meant to bring social benefits are twisted beyond belief. For example, the Obama administration took a decision a couple of months ago to extend the period for reduced interest on student loans. ABC News put a straight forward headline: “White House Launching A Major Campaign To Keep Federal Student Loan Rates At Current Levels.”
But wait a minute. Brace for the rightist spin. Here is what Fox reported: “Obama Is ‘Bribing Generations’ To Get Re-elected”. In fact, on the April 23 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros accused President Obama of trying to “bribe” college students with the aforementioned decision.
Similarly, in the April 25 edition of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Rush Limbaugh Show,  Limbaugh maintained that the proposed move was a “Push to try to buy the youth vote.”
And that is not all. Nearly all of these media outlets have a penchant for picking up incidents that are otherwise normal in nature and give it a spin to accuse Obama’s complicity. Consider this. On April 14, a car carrying a couple, Dave Forster and Marjon Rostami, stopped at a red light in Norfolk, Varginia. As they waited for it to turn green, a teenager from a crowd threw a rock at the passenger seat window, prompting Forster to get out of the car and confront him. He was suddenly overpowered by the group and thrashed badly. And so was his girlfriend. The police arrived on the scene and the issue was settled. The incident was so unworthy of reporting that the couples’ own publication considered not to mention it in the local paper. But not Fox.
Bill O’Reilly somehow found about it and the Fox News host turned the incident into national news by adding one detail: The attackers were black, and the victims were white. The headline “In Obama’s America, Black Kids Thrash White Kids” ran for two complete days, both as header as well as ticker.
In fact, it is slowly becoming a trend. If someone follows the Conservative media these days, which is not at all a pleasant job, one can notice that they are promoting an idea that there is a simmering “race war” going on in the US today. They try to use disparate data points and often mix it up with aforementioned anecdotes to push the narrative that Black-on-White violence is spiking. And who is responsible for all this? Of course Barack Obama. No points for guessing that .