Illinois Democratic State Senator Ricky Hendon said that Republican Gubernatorial candidate Bill Brady wanted to kill homosexuals and that women should have no rights. Hendon also called Brady idiotic, racist, sexist, and homophobic. But, if you watched the Fox channel in Chicago for your local news, you’d never know it.
In a classic case of offering the bare minimum, token coverage of a major story, WFLD pretended to cover the uproar over the speech without really covering it. Here is their report with a very small portion (the tamest, in fact) of Hendon’s remarks:
Now read Hendon’s actual remarks:
I’ve never served with such an idiotic, racist, sexist, homophobic person in my life. If you think that the minimum wage needs to be three dollars an hour, vote for Bill Brady. If you think that women have no rights whatsoever, except to have his children, vote for Bill Brady. If you think gay and lesbian people need to be locked up and shot in the head, vote for Bill Brady.
Not only does the media pass over his most offensive charges, but then they go out and find Gov. Pat Quinn’s running mate to support the spirit of Hendon’s outrageous remarks, if not the actual words. Even Quinn has refused to apologize for the remarks made while he was standing right next to Hendon. Quinn has also said that they should not “mask in any way the positions that Bill Brady has taken.”
My favorite part is when the anchors seriously discuss the inflammatory rhetoric. They behave as though Hendon’s words were seriously objectionable, but remember, as far as the actual report that they just showed their viewers, the worst thing Hendon said about Brady was that he wanted the minimum wage to be $3.00 and that he wanted to take rights away from women.
Where was the part about putting a bullet in the heads of gays and lesbians? Where was the part about Brady being “idiotic, racist, sexist, and homophobic”? If WFLD were your only source of news, you’d think these anchors were the biggest wimps on earth for wringing their hands over Hendon’s speech.
Hendon is described by the anchors as “raising the energy level in the room” and as having a “dramatic style.” The anchors even provide lame excuses for Quinn’s lack of reaction to Hendon’s speech while he stood by his side on stage: “Maybe he was focusing about what he was going to say.”
It’s not news to most of us that Democrats tend to think Republicans are not just wrong, but bad, evil, and mean as well. It’s something most of us have learned to live with in the past few decades of divisive and demonizing political rhetoric coming from the left.
What is news, is that news channels don’t think that it is news.
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