Jason Riley
With Rupert Murdoch at the helm of the
Wall Street Journal, the paper has become little more than a Fox News rag of right-wing spews or a
New York Post in staid typeface. Par for the conservative course, racism is always
de rigueur and standard operating procedure for right-wing media is to find a black or brown face, or someone with an Hispanic surname, to mouth attacks on communities of color and public policies that advance equality. This is somehow a shield to protect the institution from charges of racism.
The selection of black faces to front for reactionary Republican ideology is not a new strategy, nor is it meant to win over blacks to a right-wing-agenda. We are not stupid. It's a sop to right-white sensibilities so they can then say, "See...a black man said it".
Oh, my!
Charles Blow recently took a look at this phenomena in Blacks, Conservatives and Plantations, and I've frequently profiled other discordant black right-wing talking heads in the past.
Murdoch's choice of Jason Riley as the black trojan horse co-signs Republican Party ideology to penetrate and tear down the walls of Democratic Party liberalism has been interesting to watch.
Jason Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board. He joined the paper in 1994 as a copyreader on the national news desk in New York. He moved to the editorial page in 1995 as copyreader and later became a copy editor. In April 1996, he was named to the newly created position of editorial interactive editor and maintained the editorial and Leisure & Arts section of WSJ.com. He was named a senior editorial page writer in March 2000, and member of the Editorial Board in 2005.
Riley has the added advantage of being married to a white woman,
Naomi Schaefer-Riley, also a Murdoch minion, and their inter-racial couplehood gives her cover, from her current position at the
New York Post to launch racist screeds, and then have the defense to hide behind—"But... but...but...she can't be a racist. Her husband is
black." She has the added advantage of being able to take on feminists, of course, because ... she's female.
Yawn and chuckle.
As if we, who watch, aren't familiar with the game.
Follow me below the fold for more laughs.
Riley, from his lofty position as the black voice at the Wall Street Journal has launched his How Liberal Policies Fail Black Americans tour, part and parcel of his book launch, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed, published by right-wing Encounter Books.
In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.
The fact that the word, "liberal," excludes us black folks who are liberal, or left, or who have been fighting for civil rights is overlooked in the title and text.
It's you durned white liberals doling out welfare and affirmative action who are keeping us black folks down!
Cue the glowing reviews from the Heritage Foundation and talking head bookings with the National Review and a blitz on Fox.
For those of you who don't follow the color token road—here's some background on Riley's positions.
He's against raising the minimum wage, hates affirmative action, defended George Zimmerman (black underclass thugs are the real problem) and labelled MSNBC hosts "mediocrities."
“I think there’s a pattern at MSNBC of them hiring black mediocrities like Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson, Touré, and, of course — the granddaddy of them all — Al Sharpton, simply to race-bait” Riley asserted.
He added that these and other MSNBC hosts routinely assert that “all of black peoples’ problems are caused by white people, and if you disagree with that, Mary, you’re a racist.”
Riley concluded that MSNBC’s modest ratings are “encouraging” that there is little “appetite” for the kind of discourse he identified. However, he said that these points of view are not “representative of the larger black population” or “responsible.”
Sure.
Mediocrities?
BTX3 does a resume comparison between Riley and those of Melissa Harris-Perry, Michael Eric Dyson and Touré to shut that down.
Jason Riley is a big Bill O’Reilly fan.
No, Bill O’Reilly Is Not the ‘First Black Prime Time Cable News Host’:
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley thinks that if Bill Clinton was “the first black president despite appearances,” then perhaps Bill O’Reilly “ought to be considered the first black prime time cable news host.” In a new column titled “In Praise of Bill O’Reilly” posted Tuesday evening, Riley, who himself is African-American, commends the Fox News host’s efforts to “speak honestly about the problems facing the black underclass.” Instead of focusing on “what others should do to help blacks” as he says most television hosts do, O’Reilly “maintains—with logic and history on his side—that blacks must first help themselves.”
As one example of O’Reilly’s approach to race, Riley looks at the host’s suggestion after an Easter weekend shooting in Chicago that that city “already has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation and that plenty of jurisdictions with fewer such restrictions experience much less gun violence.” While O’Reilly’s guest, a black pastor from Chicago, argued that young men in his community need a “better education system” and “better resources,” O’Reilly countered by saying “you can’t force kids to learn” and argued for armed soldiers in the streets.
“Ghetto residents do not need more people making excuses for black pathology, which is mostly what they get from cable commentators, especially the black ones,” Riley says, without naming any specific names. “What blacks need is an honest conversation about black culture. Mr. O’Reilly is providing a public service by conducting one.”
Other gems from Riley's pen include
Jason Riley: Obama Part Of "Blame America First" Crowd.
Oh why, oh why, does Barack Obama hate America so?
Riley loves attacking the NAACP of course, in pieces like Fox News Guest: NAACP Supports Minimum Wage Laws That ‘Disproportionately Harm Black Workers’. This piece was posted to Stormfront (I'm not linking), which, of course, elicited reader responses like:
Blacks are dim witted morons. Fact
Dim witted morons lead by highly motivated,greedy and intelligent Jews,who have a very definite agenda of seizing control of all economic and social environments in America ASAP.
Enslaving white America with threats of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Homosexual or Indian influences has always been a mainstay of Jewish domination in America.Jews dream is to become "The Cracker".
Way to go, JR! Stir up the sewer dwelling haters who "love Amurrica," one that they don't want you or your wife in, but no matter.
Naomi Schaefer Riley
The other half of this Murdoch media duo is Naomi Schaefer, who
married Riley in 2004. At the time, she was an adjunct fellow at the arch-conservative
Ethics and Public Policy Center, former home of Rick Santorum.
She was booted from blogging at the Chronicle of Higher Education for her now infamous and terminally stupid attack on Black Studies.
You’ll have to forgive the lateness but I just got around to reading The Chronicle’s recent piece on the young guns of black studies. If ever there were a case for eliminating the discipline, the sidebar explaining some of the dissertations being offered by the best and the brightest of black-studies graduate students has made it. What a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap. The best that can be said of these topics is that they’re so irrelevant no one will ever look at them.
Um...she looked at the titles, read a sidebar blurb, and from her position of privilege and know-nothingness, made an assessment of academic work that isn't in her field.
One headline defending her, in responding to a critique of her CHE post from Racism Review, made a point of the fact that "her husband is black."
I had to chortle. Brought back memories of the campaign to get rid of racist Lou Dobbs from CNN. The pushback argument from the right was, "But...but...but...his wife is Hispanic!"
From her position as a New York Post columnist, her latest effort is to launch limp salvos at Ta-Nehisi Coates (and Charles Blow for added measure) in Let’s stop ‘talking about race’. She is more than likely still smarting from Coates' response to her Black Studies attack.
From Black Studies and 'Intellectual Cowardice':
Calling for the abolition of a department based on the seeming esoteric nature of its dissertations strikes me as silly. I'm willing to bet I could make the same case against English and Anthropology departments around the country. But calling for the abolition of those departments based on the dissertations, and then bragging that you haven't read any of them is journalistic malpractice.
She got a mention in
Don't Litigate It, Don't Ever Talk About It: Right-Wing Media's Solution to Racial Discrimination:
Williamson wasn't the only conservative media figure whose solution to racial discrimination includes pretending race-conscious measures are inappropriate. Naomi Schaefer Riley, who once called for the elimination of black studies from college campuses, wrote in a recent New York Post column that we've talked enough about race. According to Schaefer Riley, Americans are "done with a national dialogue on race" and Coates' essay "offers nothing new." She also complained that Coates' advocacy for HR 40 was evidence that "our country's media elites are still stuck on a liberal baby boomer racial narrative," and concluded that the way forward now is not discussion, but "colorblindness."
"Colorblindness" is the Roberts' Court agenda for dismantling every gain we've made since the 1950's, and is also blind to contemporary inequities. But no matter, Schaefer-Riley has the screed-o down pat.
She also uses her platform at the Post to attack feminists—I almost choked on my coffee when she presented her ideas on what to do about campus rape (which is somehow the fault of liberals) and how conservatives would have handled it better:
In which case, again, things would’ve been much better handled had conservatives been in charge. We’d get single-sex dorms, more restrictions on drinking, perhaps even some classes on chivalry instead of ones about the “rape culture.”
Chivalry classes? Teh mind boggles.
Neither of these two are old. Don't fool yourselves into thinking that the right-wing money machine isn't spawning a new generation of bigots. No matter the race or the gender of the messengers.
We have work to do to ensure that our young folks don't fall for the Murdoch media smoke and mirrors.