MediaWatch: December 1991

Reporters Can't Resist Lumping Republicans With Nazis

DUKE: GOP POSTER CHILD?

Despite Republican rejection of David Duke, reporters continue to insist that the entire Republican Party specializes in racist campaign tactics. In the November 25 Time magazine, Washington reporter Dan Goodgame announced: "Demagogues don't yell `nigger' or `Jew boy' anymore. They've learned better...[Duke] traded in his bigoted rhetoric for a slick new glossary of coded appeals to racial resentment, market tested over the past two decades by mainstream conservative politicians."

On NBC's Today show November 13, reporter Lisa Myers charged all the recent Republican Presidents with race-baiting: "Since [1968], every Republican presidential candidate has run on some issue that raised racial overtones. Richard Nixon preached law and order in the wake of the Watts riots....Ronald Reagan told the story of the welfare queen ....George Bush was accused of playing racial politics when he made a national figure out of this Massachusetts convict [Willie Horton]." Myers ended with this befuddling comment: "But win or lose, the politics of race works."

Conservative Kirk Fordice scored a stunning upset in the Mississippi governor's race, but reporters simply lumped him with Duke. On November 6, NBC's Andrea Mitchell asserted: "Although George Bush led the cheering today for Fordice's victory, he won partly by playing the race card, appealing to some of the same white fears David Duke is exploiting in neighboring Louisiana."

In the next morning's Wall Street Journal, reporter James Perry seconded that emotion: "In Mississippi, Mr. Fordice, the GOP winner, rode to victory by echoing Mr. Duke's rhetoric in Louisiana, attacking job quotas and calling for `workfare, not welfare.'" Time reporter Michael Duffy's November 18 election wrap-up read: "Fordice's anti-liberal, anti-quota, anti-welfare campaign had a strong racial undercurrent that could prove embarrassing to the national GOP. An article on the next page suggested Fordice "played the oldest card in Southern politics, the racial resentment of whites."

Mississippi's local media criticized the national media's repeated Duke comparisons. The Meridian Star editorialized on November 10: "The national `spin' on Mississippi's gubernatorial election has spun out of control, and the result has been an unfair likening of our race to Louisiana's....This newspaper endorsed [Ray] Mabus, but we are not blind to the political shortcomings and strategic mistakes that contributed to his defeat. The national analysts would do well to delve a little deeper into the factors behind that defeat rather than make unfounded and largely uninformed assumptions."

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