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Corporate media don’t like to recall the Martin Luther King who called for a “radical restructuring of society.”
This week on CounterSpin: Quite a few newspapers carried conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg’s complaint that the inauguration boycott by Rep. John Lewis and others “is exactly what the Russians probably wanted from the beginning.” (Goldberg’s proof that Lewis’ stance is mere partisanship is that he also boycotted George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration.)
Still, when Donald Trump greeted the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, if you will, with a swipe at Lewis, many in corporate media expressed ready disapproval for what Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson called Trump’s “disregard for the American narrative,” in which Lewis is an undeniable hero. (For Gerson, Lewis’s challenge to the 2000 election is merely a sign of his “disturbing habit of hyperbole.”)
But the relative ease with which elite media defended John Lewis belies a more complex relationship between the press corps and the civil rights movement, which the Martin Luther King holiday always serves to highlight.
As Free Press’s Joseph Torres wrote recently, “Sanitizing King’s legacy is a deliberate act.”
Media’s traditional misremembering of King distorts his ideas and priorities, and rewrites the press’s own role in history; it also projects a distorted vision of what protest means and how social change happens—a clear view of which is much in demand right now.
We’ve talked about this subject a number of times on the show; we revisit some of them in a special look at “The Media and Martin Luther King.”
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.