'Meet MSNBC. Better Described as Jim Crow TV'

The NBC/Comcast-owned network “feeds on liberal culture of racism,” Jeffrey Lord writes in his spot-on analysis at the American Spectator:

Whether one talks current or past hosts and stars at the network, from Al Sharpton to Matthews to Touré to Melissa Harris-Perry to the now unlamented and disappeared Martin Bashir, listening to these people and others on the network is like eavesdropping on a Klan revival. Where the ideal of a Jim Crow society — a society where everyone is judged by race — is the gold standard.

Matthews wants to apologize for whites.

Harris-Perry mocks Mitt Romney for having an adopted black grandchild.

Al Sharpton is on audio tape scorning former New York Mayor David Dinkins as a “n….”

Bashir was urging an old-fashioned slave punishment be applied to former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Touré, as reported here in The Daily Caller, founded a newspaper in college that “only solicited funds from blacks.” Wrote the DC:

Touré’s flagship publication, The Fire This Time, lavished praise on famous anti-Semites, black supremacists, and conspiracy theorists whom Touré helped bring to campus. Before he became an intense-but-sardonic TV personality, Touré also decried “the suffocating white community” and defended a nationally famous fake hate crime.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Touré described the newspaper as “an important black voice on campus.”

Question. What is the difference between Touré’s paper and this one — a newspaper that “was the newspaper of the white supremacist Citizens’ Council of Mississippi between October 1955 and September 1961. It was intended to spread a pro-segregationist message throughout the southern states with the hope that white people would be outraged that their children had to share classrooms with African-Americans and would organize to resist racial desegregation and restore white supremacist rule.”

Answer: There is no difference. Both Touré’s college paper and the paper published by the Citizens Council were devoted to what is today quaintly called “identity politics” — dividing by race. The staple of Jim Crow politics. Both were outgrowths of progressive politics and the racial pandering that is part and parcel of the American Left throughout American history.

Arguably, Boston based talk radio host Michael Graham got there first in explaining how Democrats have remained obsessed with racialism in his 2002 book Redneck Nation. As he told NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez shortly after its publication:

[W]hen I talk about redneckery in Redneck Nation, I’m not talking about the Jeff Foxworthy stereotypes. I’m writing about the ideology: What did a typical white southern “redneck” believe at the beginning of the civil-rights movement 50 years ago?

• He believed that race mattered, that race was determinant.
• He believed that free speech was dangerous, spread by “outside agitators” who never learned the southern speech code: “If you can’t say something nice…drink.”
• He believed that all women were either delicate creatures in need of special social protections, or they were road house trailer trash who would spank you and call you “Daddy.”
• He believed that the more irrational and ridiculous your religion, the more fervently you believed in God.
• He believed the most entertaining way to spend a Saturday night was to watch something get “blowed up real good.”

And on and on.

Lopez: How are we becoming a redneck nation?

Graham: Just look at the list above. Having fled these attitudes among my rural southern neighbors, I know live in a modern, liberal America where Ivy League colleges are building segregating housing because “race matters.” I actually heard one modern defender of segregated public schools (blacks-only academies) say “black people learn differently from white people.” Gee, I haven’t heard that since I was 12 — from a klan member!

That last point, incidentally, was made by President Obama’s former spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in his 2008 address to the NAACP, which CNN declared to be a “home run,” as the Time-Warner-owned news network began to morph into an MSNBC clone. Yet another reminder that 12 years after Graham’s book, and as always with an ideology devoted to “Progressivism,” led by a president whose campaign motto was “Change,” nothing actually has changed within their worldview.

Update: At Truth Revolt, Trey Sanchez writes that MSNBC’s parent network is “Fast Becoming NB-See You Later:”

Even with two of the longest-running shows on television, Meet the Press and The Today Show, NBC is losing viewers to other networks. ABC’s Good Morning America has seen more viewers than The Today Show, while Meet the Press is losing to CBS’s Face the Nation and ABC’s This Week. In the ratings game, especially from a network that is vying for viewers, firing your number one is the opposite of good business.

Did the confidence for this move come from the idea that NBC’s Olympic coverage would make up for the loss? Who knows. But when host Bob Costas airs a segment during the coverage praising Putin, NBC execs should fear alienating their audience — especially after taking away their beloved Leno. This begs the question: Are they passive-aggressively trying to break-up with their viewers?

As Ricochet’s Troy Senik has noted, “Populism’s Hard When You Don’t Like the People.” And when all NBC viewers need to do is to watch a few minutes of MSNBC to quickly ascertain how much the two ideologically intertwined TV networks loathe their audience, the network shouldn’t be surprised when the revulsion is reciprocated.

Or almost any Bob Costas monologue, come to think of it.

More: “MSNBC Scrambles Behind the Scenes to Change Its Vitriolic Culture.” But how, when its cultural worldview is baked deeply into the firmament of the left? As Ace noted at the end of last month after the network’s racist Cheerios tweets, MSNBC is “Progressivism’s” out of control primitive Id — and its fellow leftists in the MSM have finally noticed, if only because, as he writes, “Many progressive reporters would like to think of themselves as somewhat elevated. MSNBC will not allow them that. MSNBC will give them no place to hide. MSNBC will allow them no cover, not even an inch of it.”

But how does NBC dial back the knobs from 11 on the race hatred at their cable subsidiary, without alienating its small group of ideologically committed and equally firebreathing viewers?