Malcolm X had a few choice remarks for the press in 1964 at the Audubon Ballroom. He acknowledged its importance while simultaneously criticizing it. “Newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and admiring the oppressors,” the Harlem activist said. His remarks summarize Fox News' talks of Black Lives Matter to its viewers fifty-seven years later.
Regardless of how the group or movement is presently described, Black Lives Matter began in 2013 as a response to police killings of Black individuals without due process.Regardless of one's feelings about individual members or the acts of those who seek to derail the movement, the genesis story is one of Black people striving for equal treatment in America.
Fox News is completely unconcerned about it.
From November 2020 to April 2021, Fox News broadcasted 440 remarks on the Black Lives Matter movement, according to Media Matters, a research and information center that monitors and corrects conservative misinformation in the United States media. According to the research, throughout that time span, “Fox has consistently devalued and criticized the efforts of protestors and organizers, rejecting their concerns and assaulting the persons behind the movements.”
BLM, according to the news conglomerate, is an extreme group that wants "white people be deprogrammed" and is on a mission to "overthrow the United States." Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Pete Hegseth, and Will Cain are singled out as leaders of the assaults, accounting for 20% of all comments during that time period, according to the research.
In the aftermath of Derek Chauvin's murder of George Floyd, Carlson stood out as the most severe perpetrator, since he purposefully mischaracterized nonviolent demonstrations. On April 20, he said that jurors found Chauvin guilty because they were afraid “after nearly a year of BLM arson, looting, and murder.”
The United States Crisis Monitor, a collaboration between Princeton University and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, looked at over 7,750 protests in 2,400 sites across the country. According to the Associated Press, they discovered that 93 percent of the time, there was no violence.
Carlson was working with Fox's general objective of how they're portraying demonstrations, according to Media Matters. Following the January 6 insurgency, he made many attempts to divert the focus away from the right-wing extremism on display to the BLM movement's "extremists." The news organization minimized the Trump-supporting mob's violent behavior, implying that the Capitol attack was comparable to BLM protests, but the media treated the events differently.
Julie Watson, an Associated Press reporter, slammed the connection. The uprising was described by Watson as "an intentional, direct attack on a hallowed democratic institution with the goal of overturning a fair and free election," while Black Lives Matters protests were described as "a coast-to-coast protest movement demanding an end to systemic racism that occasionally, but not frequently, turned violent."
It's fair to argue that no rational person would have made the connection in the first place. It's also on-brand for White folks to criticize any Black people working for equality and then complain about the media "unfairly attacking" them after attempting to destroy the American government.
As if Black people could get away with things that White people couldn't.
The BLM group is fighting back against attacks from organizations like as Fox News and the spread of false information. Black Lives Matter has launched a new misinformation landing page. They urge people to pick the type of misinformation they've seen, how they'd rank it, and whether or not they'd like screenshots of it.
“There's still lots of disinformation online meant to generate uncertainty and distrust,” Jorden Giger, an activist with Black Lives Matter in South Bend, Indiana, told NPR in May.
However, this type of deception isn't new. Some of it might come from the old-style, anti-civil rights playbook of the 1960s, according to Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute.
It was a well-known FBI strategy, thanks to J. Edgar Hoover. “As a result, opponents portrayed activists as lawbreakers or aggressive when they were largely nonviolent,” Brown-Nagin told NPR. “Martin Luther King Jr. and others of his close circle were also accused of being communists or sympathizers with communists.”
In terms of the press, Malcolm X was correct. It's a case of "no idea's original" when Fox News uses misinformation methods to undermine BLM. When it comes to vilifying someone, there's nothing new under the sun.
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