Ferguson’s booming white grievance industry: Fox News, Darren Wilson and friends

[DonViejo]

White defenders of officer Darren Wilson are raising money by slandering Mike Brown, with some help from Fox News

JOAN WALSH

Not surprisingly, a thriving franchise of the nation’s booming white grievance industry has opened up in Ferguson, Mo. over the last week. It’s worth examining closely. As usual, it consists of two parts lies, one part paranoia, but at its heart it’s a big grift.

The weekend featured multiple protests supporting Darren Wilson, the missing Ferguson police officer who shot an unarmed Mike Brown on Aug. 9. His superiors apparently withheld Wilson’s name long enough for him to delete all social media accounts and skip town, but his supporters are declaring Wilson, not Brown, the victim here. A GoFundMe site raising funds for Wilson’s defense – though he’s not been charged with anything – garnered not only $250,000 in donations, but so many ugly racist rants GoFundMe administrators had to disable comments for the site. (They’ll have no trouble taking a cut of the racists’ money, of course.) Wilson’s supporters say they’ve raised $374,000 online and at local events, “to support his family,” one woman told MSNBC.

Why, besides racism, are Wilson’s supporters so convinced of his innocence? Well, any good grift will involve a hoax or two, to gin up the sense of outrage. First there was “Josie,” a purported friend of Wilson’s who called into a radio show helmed by gun-loving wing-nut Dana Loesch to tell Wilson’s side of the story. “Josie” insisted that Brown attacked Wilson, grabbed his gun, and the terrified cop shot only in self-defense. The problem? The details were almost identical to those shared on a fake Facebook page set up to look like Wilson’s own. But before the tale could be debunked, not only Fox but CNN had reported on “Josie’s” tale with some credulity. As karoli notes over at Crooks and Liars, it’s not clear whether Loesch was punked, or was in on the punking.

Then we saw right-wing blogger Jim Hoft, named “the dumbest man on the Internet” by Media Matters, peddling a phony X-ray or CT scan purporting to show that Wilson suffered a fractured eye socket scuffling with Brown. Unfortunately, a little sleuthing revealed the image in question came from a facility at the University of Iowa and had nothing to do with the Ferguson case. Oops. Of course Fox ran with the story, but ABC News also reported that Wilson had suffered a “serious facial injury,” claiming its own local source.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/08/25/ferguson%E2%80%99s_booming_white_grievance_industry_fox_news_darren_wilson_and_friends/

[Baitball Blogger]

1. They are not doing anything that they haven't done before.

What has changed is that it's no longer working for them because we can see right through them.

[underpants]

2. Excellent read as always

[gordianot]

3. Fox News follows definite reactionary formula.

1. Establish an enemy target for outrage.
2. Discredit the target by any means available.
3. Reinforce outrage by reporting outrage against the target.
4. Report any line used against the target as fact.

Sometimes the outrage gets derailed as not true anytime that happens drop coverage. By that time it is too late your audience is set up convinced everything that came prior to actual facts is true. At a later date repeat lies against the target mission accomplished.