Of all the videos to emerge from both presidential campaigns, one has received more attention (if you consider racist venom attention) than any other.
The video? A seemingly mundane offering from President Obama announcing the 2012 launch of "African-Americans for Obama."
Ari Melber, writing for Reuters, notes (with emphasis mine):
Of all of the videos released by the Obama campaign this year – a blizzard of ads, clips and documentary footage devoured by fans – the most viewed item is a seemingly anodyne constituency video launching “African-Americans for Obama.” It drew a huge 3.5 million views over the past eight months. Why?
Viewer data shows that the audience came from outraged referrals by Fox News, conservative websites and Facebook. On YouTube, viewers’ votes “disliking” the video ran an overwhelming 14 to 1, while thousands of Fox visitors tagged it “offensive,” apparently upset that the president talked about his African-American support.
Beyond eclipsing all of Obama’s other material, the video also drew double the views of the Romney campaign’s most popular video this year.
Here is the offending video:
Indeed, this innocuous video has been flooded with vile comments and "disliked" on Youtube 29,517 times (at present).
Ari Melber brings up this racist, Fox-News-led reaction to Obama's video in a larger piece about the fiction of a post-racial America. It's a piece he wrote on the occasion of the Supreme Court's current consideration of affirmative action's legality (and the Romney campaign's surprising silence on the issue).
Now, Melber knows we do not live in a post-racial America, a stop-and-frisk-obsessed country with more black men trapped by the justice system than were slaves in 1850.
He notes what Fox News has ginned up – this incredible, faux outraged spurred on by real racism – to demonstrate the vile currents Romney must contend with, and perhaps placate, to win in November.
I note it to show, once again, the damage Fox News does to our social fabric – a fabric that is clearly still torn in certain places by racist hate.
A racist hate Fox News just loves to feed.