“Rush Limbaugh: New Media Prevented Mainstream Media from Turning ‘Gentle Giant’ into Rodney King,” Tony Lee writes at Big Journalism:
“Well, now, there are people willing to stand up, go to great lengths to call ’em out on this, so they simply don’t have a free road.” Limbaugh continued. “And they’re not used to this kind of opposition, even though it’s not new now. They’ve never learned how to fight.”
Limbaugh noticed that “CNN is noticeably down” because, even in their headlines, “it’s beginning to dawn on them that the myth might not prevail here.” Headlines have included, “It’s starting to return to normal in Ferguson” and “the credibility of key witnesses in question.” He noted that even the New York Times conceded, even though it was in paragraph 26, that the police officer was “beaten up” and “still taken to the hospital.”
Limbaugh said the original story of “the gentle giant walking innocently down the street on the way to grandmother’s house, eagerly thinking about the soon-to-commence college classes, shot in the back by a racist white St. Louis cop” is falling apart.
After the mainstream press tried to rebuild the myth of the “gentle giant,” surveillance video of his strong-arm robbery was released, “and the gentle giant was no longer gentle,” Limbaugh noted.
“He was a thief. Forty-four dollar box of Swisher Sweets, and furthermore, he was abusive to the clerk, shoving him away, as the clerk attempted to keep him from walking out of the store with the stolen cigars,” Limbaugh said. “Then we learn from an autopsy conducted by the myth makers that the gentle giant was not shot from behind. And then we learned that the gentle giant actually did reach into the car and may have attempted to get the cop’s gun. And so then a number of witnesses came forward, but many of them are beginning to lose credibility.”
In light of these facts, Limbaugh said, “the myth is getting a little harder to hold onto, because if there was ever any real media scrutiny involved, the myth could not survive.”
“You can see that watching CNN, there’s not this confidence that the myth, as originally created, is gonna hold up, simply because it can’t,” he said. “You can tell by watching CNN that something’s happened, and it’s no longer the slam dunk that everybody thought it was, even two days ago.”
Speaking of which, “MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry compared complaints about ‘outside agitators’ stirring up violence in Ferguson to the rhetoric of Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor,” on her eponymously titled show on the NBC-Comcast-owned cable network.
I’m not sure if Harris-Perry reminded her viewer* that Bull Connor was a Democrat National Committee member — if so, I’m sure it was an unintentional oversight.
* OK, there may be more than one.
Related: “You Thought There Was no Possible Link Between Ferguson and Climate Change? Think Again…”
I knew it was there somewhere! But then, since global warming causes everything, why not Ferguson as well?
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