Screenshot of Fox essay dated June 3, 2015
It is known that Dylann Roof perpetrated his racist massacre in Charleston, SC, on June 17, having been influenced by the writing of hate groups including the Council of Concerned Citizens (CCC). It is also clear that Roof's perception of the world fits in with the type of discourse on the racist right more generally.
Bill O'Reilly interviewed Todd Rutherford, a Charleston lawmaker and friend to one of the deceased in the massacre. According to Salon, the interview included this exchange:
Rutherford told CNN that when Roof “watches things like Fox News, where they talk about things that they call news, but they’re really not [and] use that coded language, they use hate speech, they talk about the president as if he’s not the president” — that primes people like Roof to “walk into a church and treat people like animals, when they’re really human beings.”
Despite having just played the clip in which Rutherford claimed that Roof watched programming “like Fox News,” O’Reilly insisted that he claimed Roof watched the network itself, and couldn’t be disabused of the argument. “You said, ‘he watches Fox News,’” O’Reilly erroneously repeated.
Now, I've seen no evidence that Dylan Roof watched or read Fox. But let's take up the actual claim made Rutherford that he watched media "like Fox News", and that contributed to his racism and pushed him towards committing murder.
As has been widely reported, Dylann Roof was directly influenced the Council of Concerend Citizens (CCC), a racist hate organization that has contributed money to numerous Republican politicians. In his "manifesto" Roof has this to say about the impact of the CCC:
this prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?
Screenshot of CCC webpage dated June 8, 2015
Here's how
Time characterizes the CCC, with a quote by CCC spokesman Jared Taylor:
“For a young man like Dylann Roof to be constantly reminded of the sins of his ancestors, that’s going to make people hopping mad,” Taylor says. “Many people are angry about the genuine facts of interracial crime in the United States, but that anger should not by any means be channeled into violence.”
The group is particularly focused on crime perpetrated by African-Americans against white people. A CCC blog post from January said there were 361 black-on-white murders in 2014.
But according to the most recent numbers by the FBI, a majority of homicides are committed by whites against whites. In 2013, the FBI found that of the 3,005 white individuals murdered that year, 2,509 of the offenders were white and 409 were black.
So the CCC website contributed to the racist hatred and fear of Roof by creating a misleading narrative of "black on white crime" and talking of a liberal and media conspiracy covering this up, which radicalized Roof and pushed him further toward racist murderous action.
Now to Fox. Here's an article on Fox by Todd Starnes published on June 3, 2015, that is, exactly two weeks before Roof's massacre:
"Todd Starnes: Do Democrats Care About Black-on-White Crime?"
But it seems as though in the eyes of the mainstream media - and Democrats - only black lives matter. That’s what they preach in their hashtag activism.
“Police are killing minorities!” That's what the headlines allege. They would have us believe that law enforcement is the problem. But the facts prove otherwise.
So what are we going to do? I say lock and load, America.
It's for such a time as this that our Founding Fathers saw fit to write the Second Amendment. You never know when you and your family might set upon by predators lurking outside a Waffle House.
Fox's propaganda is in close alignment with CCC ideology. Fox pushes the same racist narrative as the CCC.
However, there appears one difference between the CCC and Fox.
Although it's completely disingenuous, the CCC pretends to disavow violence that stems from its advocacy of racism and hatred.
Fox, on the other hand, while preaching the same racism and hatred as the CCC, encourages gun violence.