No longer content to use dog whistles in its coverage of the 2012 campaign, Fox News sounded a racial foghorn this morning in its Election Day coverage.
On “Fox & Friends” this morning, co-host Steve Doocy and legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. were shocked to learn that a black man was “standing guard outside a polling place in Philadelphia.”
“He’s in some kind of semi-military pose,” Johnson warned. “If someone stands at the poll in a way that appears to be intimidating, it is intimidating” he continued, while the video showed the man smiling and holding the door open for two women on their way to vote.
The man in the video is reportedly a member of the New Black Panther Party — a group over which the right wing has obsessed since the 2008 election, when Fox News (among other right-wing media outlets) pushed the narrative that Barack Obama won with the help of the group’s intimidation tactics. Unsurprisingly, the “facts” surrounding the scandal never added up.
If Fox News were really interested in voter intimidation, it wouldn’t have to look far for a legitimate story. Today a Pennsylvania judge was forced to issue an order preventing Republicans poll “observers” from demanding that voters show their ID before entering the polling place, which is not required by the law. Unless any of those observers adopted a “semi-military pose,” however, you probably won’t see that story on “Fox & Friends” any time soon.
