2011 WaPo Headline Shows Exactly Why We Don’t Buy the Media’s Trump-is-Racist Narrative: ‘Romney Using a KKK Slogan in His Speeches’

Lately, everyone’s been talking about race — the media is constantly hammering the idea that President Donald Trump is race baiting or secretly sending signals to white supremacists via Twitter that implies that he approves of their evil ideology. Reporters are absolutely baffled over their inability to convince “we the people” that Trump is a nefarious racist or is otherwise emotionally unbalanced.

This line of attack on Trump was recently reignited after the tragic events in Charlottesville when a woman killed when a suspected white nationalist crashed his car into demonstrators. Reporters believed Trump didn’t condemn the white nationalists quickly enough. Later, he did condemn violence “on both sides,” that also wasn’t enough for them.

However, I came across a 2011 Washington Post headline that exactly shows why the American people don’t buy their interpretation of the President and are actually happy that the President is not going out of his way to placate them. The headline screamed, “Mitt Romney is Using a KKK Slogan in His Speeches.”

Now that’s a racially inflammatory headline, isn’t it?  However, the article was a complete and utter fabrication.  Check out the editor’s note that eventually was added under the headline. It began, “This posting contains multiple, serious factual errors that undermine its premise. Mitt Romney is not using ‘Keep America American,’ which was once a KKK slogan, as a catchphrase in stump speeches, as the posting and headline stated. In a YouTube video that the posting said showed Romney using the phrase, Romney actually used a different phrase, ‘Keep America America.’”

But that’s not all that was wrong with the piece.   The video in the piece labeled as a “Mitt Romney 2012 Campaign Ad” was not actually a Romney campaign ad. Not that this was difficult to figure out. The makers of the video weren’t even trying to pull one over on unsuspecting, naïve reporters, as the included this disclaimer, “Mitt Romney does not actually support this ad.”

To their credit, the Washing Post took full responsibility for being duped, “The Post should have contacted the Romney campaign for comment before publication. Finally, we apologize that the posting began by saying “[s]omeone didn’t do his research” when, in fact, we had not done ours.” (See it for yourself here.) But how eye-opening that an established newspaper would so easily fall victim to white nationalist talking points themselves.

If the media needs to understand why the American people aren’t buying their Trump-as-Hater-in-Chief narrative, they don’t have to look any further than this WaPo piece.

Parents read the parable about the boy who cried wolf to their children when they’re young and learning how to navigate this world. The message of the story, of course, is that words lose their efficacy if they are used erroneously for too long. Philosopher C.S. Lewis had a pertinent lesson about words that the media would do well to learn. “Don’t use words too big for the subject,” he wrote. “Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” The media has been using the word “racist” for so long that it’s lost its meaning. Americans just aren’t buying it.

There’s an important conversation to be had about race in this nation. However, the media, after having completely lost its credibility, is unfit to host it.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr