{"id":334314,"date":"2017-11-10T02:55:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T01:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nbc-news-breezy-whitewash-of-white-supremacist-group\/"},"modified":"2017-11-10T02:55:29","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T01:55:29","slug":"nbc-news-breezy-whitewash-of-white-supremacist-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/nbc-news-breezy-whitewash-of-white-supremacist-group\/","title":{"rendered":"NBC News\u2019 Breezy Whitewash of White Supremacist Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Adam Johnson<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Screengrab<\/p>\n

Screengrab from NBC<\/strong> profile (11\/2\/17<\/a>) of the racist, misogynist Proud Boys organization.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As FAIR noted last year<\/a>, the rise of Trump has lead to a corollary rise in softball profiles of the most vulgar, racist extremes of the American far right. For some reason, news managers feel the need to highlight, with little if any criticism or context, pro-Trump extremists who\u2019ve been emboldened by his campaign and subsequent election. The most recent iteration of this genre was by NBC News<\/b> (11\/2\/17<\/a>), which ran a four-minute-58-second segment on a racist men\u2019s movement calling itself \u201cProud Boys\u201d:<\/p>\n

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Meet the Proud Boys, America’s Self-Proclaimed Chauvinists<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The segment\u2014part of Left Field<\/b>, NBC<\/b>‘s video documentary vertical\u2014is a gratuitous piece of embedded journalism that does little to challenge the claims made by Proud Boy talking heads, such as “there’s a mainstream societal attack on being hetero cis white men.” The piece allowed multiple Proud Boys to spout off their brand of racist and sexist talking points with zero context; arguments that Muslims are uniquely sinister and women should go back to being housewives were advanced with no pushback from other sources or NBC<\/b> itself.<\/p>\n

Introducing Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes (also co-founder of Vice<\/b> and a documented racist<\/a>), correspondent Aurora Almendral insisted, \u201cHe may be a hip New Yorker, but he\u2019s also the founder of this men-centric group that\u2019s caught on across America.\u201d Oh, so he\u2019s \u201chip,\u201d just like white supremacist Richard Spencer is \u201cdapper<\/a>.\u201d What, one is compelled to ask, is the point of calling him this?<\/p>\n

The segment couldn\u2019t bring itself to call the Proud Boys \u201cracist,\u201d \u201csexist,\u201d \u201cmisogynist\u201d or even \u201chateful,\u201d much less bother mentioning a member of the group<\/a>, Kyle Chapman, was arrested in August<\/a> for allegedly attacking a leftist protester with a lead-filled stick in Berkeley, California. McInnes\u2019 history of trafficking in white supremacist canards like \u201cwhite genocide<\/a>,\u201d circulating<\/a> in white nationalist spaces, promoting<\/a> the overt white supremacist \u201cunite the right\u201d rally in Charlottesville\u2014where one anti-racist protester was killed\u2014also didn\u2019t merit mention. The substance of the Proud Boys hate is barely commented on by the reporter; the viewer is simply left with a bunch of reasons (offered by members) why they are not <\/i>Nazis.<\/p>\n

They were presented, as Hill<\/b> editor Will Sommer later tweeted<\/a>, as \u201ca drinking club with a few un-PC opinions.\u201d NBC<\/b>‘s naive online copy for the program explained the group \u201cargues they are not white supremacist and are only speaking up for a new class of minority\u2014the disenfranchised young white male,\u201d without noting this as a white supremacist talking point as old as white supremacist organizing. KKK leader David Duke has been trying out the \u201cI\u2019m not anti-black, but pro-white\u201d line for decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Additionally, \u201cmen-centric\u201d is a delightful euphemism for a woman-hating rape apologist (\u201cIf women couldn\u2019t claim rape after inviting a man into their bedroom, they would be a lot more careful about who they invited into their bedroom.\u201d\u2014McInnes in Taki\u2019s Magazine<\/b>, 8\/23\/16<\/a>). As are other marketing labels NBC<\/b> spread uncritically throughout the piece, like \u201cpro-masculinity,\u201d \u201cmale angst\u201d and \u201cWestern chauvinist\u201d\u2014all terms the Proud Boys use to rebrand sexist hate<\/a>. Time and again, hate speech was couched in activist terms, as if there may actually exist an oppressed white male class in need of protection.<\/p>\n

That McInnes is Islamophobic was only touched on because he proudly declared it in the interview. But his history of antisemitism is glaringly omitted. Obviously, a five-minute report can\u2019t contain the entirety of McInnes\u2019s ideology, but certainly they could have brought up the time he went to Israel and did a segment<\/a> \u00a0called \u201c10 Things I Hate About Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

After allowing her interviewees to explain why their brand of hate is somehow different and not racist, Almendral offerd up tortured prose: “So fair enough, the lines between racism, xenophobia and chauvinism may exist, but they can be hard to understand.” What does this even mean?<\/p>\n

The segment ended on an equally fatuous pontification that borders on outright promotion for McInnes and Co.:<\/p>\n

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So that\u2019s all to say the Proud Boys are not alt-right, they\u2019re not neo-Nazis, but some of their opinions no longer represent the minority.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s not \u201cthey aren\u2019t alt-right or neo-Nazi, but many of their views align with those groups\u201d (a debatable but defensible statement), it\u2019s \u201cthey may not be alt-right or neo-Nazis, but they\u2019re also very popular!\u201d <\/i>This isn\u2019t a \u201cbut\u201d formulation; the latter clause doesn\u2019t contradict the former, it\u2019s a non sequitur presumably inserted because she didn\u2019t have the constitution to call a racist a racist or a sexist a sexist\u2014much less a hipster-revamped white supremacist a hipster-revamped white supremacist.<\/p>\n

\"Unicorn<\/p>\n

Unicorn Riot<\/strong> (8\/16\/17<\/a>) takes a different approach to covering the alt-right.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This isn\u2019t to say, of course, that neo-Nazis, the \u201calt-right\u201d or the so-called \u201calt-light\u201d aren\u2019t worth covering at all. But one can do so without giving them a platform, without letting them spout their genocidal ideology with little or no context. An alternative to NBC<\/b>\u2019s glossy approach is media upstart Unicorn Riot<\/b>, which was recently profiled in the Columbia Journalism Review<\/b> (11\/1\/17<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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Unicorn Riot<\/b>\u2019s structure has enabled members to publish dozens of stories on the alt-right without turning their subjects into stars or even normalizing them. While other organizations wrote celebrity profiles<\/a> that marveled<\/a> at the sartorial sense<\/a> of fashion-<\/a>conscious fascists, Unicorn Riot<\/b> revealed what the alt-right was talking about when they thought no one was listening.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In fact, as Unicorn Riot<\/b>\u2019s reporting (8\/16\/17<\/a>) reveals, one thing they talk about when no one else is listening is how to manipulate gullible reporters into boosting the movement by keeping genocidal opinions to yourself when you\u2019re talking to them:<\/p>\n

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The purpose of this is to gain sympathy for pro-white advocacy as well as a general uniting of the right wing against these communists who are gonna come shut this down, OK…. Going up to, like, MSNBC<\/b> and them interviewing you and you saying like, \u201cYeah, I actually think we should kill every non-white on the planet.\u201d\u2026 \u00a0I don\u2019t necessarily like have an issue with listening to that on a podcast or whatever, but if you are gonna do something like that, even if it\u2019s your true belief, that\u2019s not the objective of this rally, so we should try to keep it with the objective of trying to gain sympathy for a pro-white rally.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A good way to gauge whether white supremacists think they\u2019ve succeeded in spinning a news outlet into giving them a platform to \u201cgain sympathy for pro-white advocacy\u201d is to see whether the supremacists use their own media to promote the outlet\u2019s coverage. That\u2019s what McInnes did immediately after NBC<\/b> published its report:<\/p>\n

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WTF? A fair piece about #ProudBoys<\/a> from mainstream media? I’m confused. https:\/\/t.co\/nI4sB7lUKq<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) November 2, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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