How Fox News purposefully fans racial fears, and strives to incite hatred for minorities among white middle class Americans.

This of course is nothing new and most of us have already become all too aware of the racist agenda of Fox News, the Tea Party, and numerous Republicans.

However in this article by Salon article, taking excerpts from the book The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama, the pains they have taken to reignite racism in this country are laid out in no uncertain terms.  

The Fox News audience is distinct. Numerous studies have found Fox viewers to be less informed about political and current events than viewers of most other broadcast news and cable networks. This could mean either that Fox News performs less effectively in educating viewers or that Fox News attracts less knowledgeable audiences. Other studies have found that individuals who like news with in-depth interviews tend to watch network news and CNN more than Fox, and that individuals who prefer news that aligns with their already-formed opinions are much more likely to watch Fox News (while no such relationship exists for the CNN or network audiences). More research indicates that ABC, CBS, and NBC all favored their own polling numbers and reported “positive” polls for Bill Clinton and “negative” polls for George W. Bush, while Fox appeared to favor exactly the reverse. This would seem to indicate that Fox is simply on the conservative side of media bias. However, while all media outlets have political leanings, Fox News is exceptional in that Fox was especially willing to cite external polling numbers of Clinton if they were damaging—a practice that other news outlets did not perform. 

Fox News also appears to cater to ethnocentric assumptions. This discourse has grown with the election of Obama to the White House. In one study, researchers asked panelists where they obtained their televised news about national and international affairs. Roughly one-quarter of respondents indicated that they received their information from Fox News. At the time of the study, questions of Obama’s birth were being raised. When asked if they believed Obama was born in the United States, only 21 percent of Fox viewers said that Obama was American born. The authors of the study, Michael Tesler and David O. Sears, wrote, “[T]he reinforcing and/or persuasive role of oppositional media outlets like Fox News and conservative talk radio could make it increasingly difficult to disabuse the sizable minority of individuals disposed to accepting invalid assertions designed to paint Obama as the ‘other.’” In the face of such evidence, many Fox apologists, commentators, and guests often defended the views of Birthers and Tea Party activists. While frequent Fox talking head Ann Coulter claimed that that no one on Fox ever mentioned “Birtherism,” research indicates that not only did Fox News mention it; they ramped up coverage of the Birthers leading up to the April 2011 release of the “long form” birth certificate. Moreover, at least 85 percent (forty-four out of fifty-two) of false claims about Obama’s birth went unchallenged on Fox News. Fox segments repeated that Obama never produced a birth certificate, that Obama’s grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and that Obama spent $2 million in legal funds blocking the release of his birth certificate. 

The pundits:

For example, in July of 2008 Glenn Beck engaged in a pithy race-based fear-mongering remark on his Fox News show. He stated that Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” and that Obama “is, I believe, a racist.” 

White viewers of Fox were constantly framed as people who should be frightened and apprehensive about issues pertaining to race. In February 2007 Glenn Beck stated that he doesn’t “have a lot of African-American friends [because] . . . I’m afraid that I would be in an open conversation, and I would say something that somebody would take wrong, and then it would be a nightmare.” In this same vein, Bill O’Reilly stated, “Instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They’re terrified. Now we can’t even say you’re articulate? We can’t even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?” In this way, Fox commentators played up racial fears and anxieties, while painting whites as victims of overly sensitive nonwhites, race-baiters, and political correctness. 

Seizing upon this fear, Fox News and right-wing commentators anointed themselves as the real civil rights activists of today’s “anti-white” era. Glenn Beck stated that his Restoring Honor rally was to “reclaim the civil rights movement.” 

The result:

By reshaping the president’s image into that of a thief (akin to Bernie Madoff) bent on stealing money from the US public, coupled with the portrayal of his tax plan (in which the rich pay more than the current tax rate) as utterly foreign, Levin presents xenophobic messages as objective news. 

These examples indicate how right-wing news marries Obama to the already hyper-reactionary Islamophobia and nativism that began anew in the post-9/11 United States. That widespread fear of the “others” in our midst (even the White House) drives public support for not only the GOP but also repressive national security policies, any policy that the Republicans can deem “socialist,” and a juggernaut industrial-military complex, while it also engenders an organized, grass-roots backlash in the form of hyper-conservative Christian groups and anti-immigrant, vigilante, white-supremacist, and nationalist organizations. 

In addition to being labeled non-Western, noncitizen, foreign, U.S.-hating, Nazi, Communist, and “Afro-Leninist,” Obama has been consistently constructed as an “affirmative action president.” Right-wing commentators continually tell their audiences that Obama did not achieve any of his successes on his own merit and that his inferior candidacy is thus being forced down their throats. A key talking head in this strategy has been Rush Limbaugh. For example, in May of 2008, Limbaugh stated, “Barack Obama is an affirmative action candidate”; and “[i] If Barack Obama were Caucasian, they would have taken this guy out on the basis of pure ignorance long ago.” Later, in June 2008, Limbaugh stated that the Democratic Party was “go[ing] with a veritable rookie [then Senator Obama] whose only chance of winning is that he’s black.” 

Of course not only has Fox News, and Right Wing media pushed this racist narrative, it has been backed up by the Republican politicians themselves in sometimes subtle, and not so subtle, ways, and even the Supreme Court seems to be fanning the flames with their recent decisions. 

No matter how much we may want to deny it, we are essentially in the middle of another civil rights movement. Only this time the bad guys are winning, and those who fought so valiantly in support of Martin Luther King's vision, are seeing his dream reduced to ashes.

In my opinion much of this has to do with the election of the first black man as President, but a lot of it also undoubtedly has to do with the "browning" of America, and the fact that those Caucasians currently in power are seeing a future where THEY are the minority, and the power rests in the hands of "the other."