Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Media Tennessee Tea Party, Textbooks and Slavery: The Best Snowballing Media Scandal of ... Last Year?
Posted by Steven Hale on Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 5:00 AM
For the past couple of days, the blogosphere has been having deja vu all over again. As a result, some recycled outrage is afoot. At least Pith thought it sounded oddly familiar.
On Monday, crack journalists at the Huffington Post and Think Progress sounded the alarm that the Tennessee Tea Party had issued a demand for references to slavery to be removed from history textbooks, in order that we might not tarnish the image of the country’s white founders. On Tuesday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal reported the same and, as of this writing, the conservative rabble-rousers were set to be featured on Keith Olbermann’s "Worst Persons in the World" segment.
Oh no. Not again, right? Actually ... yeah. That’s right. Pith-a-Fact says: PANTS ON FIRE!
While it appears the Tennessee Tea Party did make the aforementioned outrageous demands, they did it a year ago. You know how you spend the first week of a new year writing the wrong year on your checks? It looks like the same thing happened here.
Go ahead. Click through those HuffPo links you usually (and understandably) ignore. You’ll notice that the HuffPo, ThinkProgress and WSJ posts all link to either this Salon article or this Memphis Commercial-Appeal article. Both were written in January of 2011. What’s more, the 2012 HuffPo article links to the 2011 Salon article, which links to a 2011 ... HuffPo article.
Pith isn’t high on the list of Tea Party defenders, but come on. They didn’t demand the whitewashing of history textbooks TWO YEARS IN A ROW. What kind of people do you think they are?
Comments (10)
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Rohm RG-14 22 caliber pistol used by John Hinckley Jr in attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
http://worldfamousweapons.blogspot.com/2011/04/rohm-rg-14-22-caliber-pistol-used-john.html
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Don't worry, they just haven't got around to it yet. It'll be back on the agenda this year. What else can you expect from a state that elected a guy to congress from Frog Jump?
Election year: Democrats rolling out the "other-side-is-crazy" propaganda, which, you know, the other side IS, in some cases, crazy. The Democrats have little else to campaign on because they're just as ineffectual and incompetent as the other side is crazy.
(The WSJ just likes a provocative story.)
Thank you. This has been driving me nuts since Monday! I immediately saw this story was from last year so I didn't write about it, but I guess we're the only ones who pay attention. The story went viral, even hitting ThinkProgress (which covered it the first time) and Salon.com. Well, a year went by and we don't have any sanitzed, Tea Party approved text books in our state so, quit worrying, people. I think we have some real issues that deserve everyone's attention.
Long long ago, in the 1970s, I was a student at Dupont Junior High School, in Old Hickory, and had a social studies teacher named Miss Tootle. (She was somewhat advanced in years and a friend of mine used to talk about "Adam and Miss Tootle" in the Garden of Eden.) I remember her telling a few of us students once about how they always had to check through the new textbooks to make sure there wasn't anything Communist in them. I cannot swear that by "Communist" was meant any evidence that would contradict the founding myth and exceptionalism of the U.S., but I'm guessing so.
I'm sure Frog Jump is a lovely town. So is Soddy Daisy. Hey, it's Tennessee. Quaint names are how we roll.
It is not that I am ungrateful to Pith for catching this but I cannot help thinking that if this error were made by a conservative publication, this post would be filled with all sorts of nasty adjectives regarding the intellect and biases of the source. Huff Post ought to know better but it is a very liberal operation while Olbermann is Glen Beck with talent.
Sheesh, Mark, do you really need to do the what-if in this case? It seems a bit much to call Pith out for something they haven't done right after they corrected a silly mistake by "liberals." You folks are never satisfied. Supply some nasty adjectives they can use the next time this happens, if you must.
Sorry. We really meant to pile on the Wall Street Journal. We'll make sure to anticipate your prejudices next time.
@Mark Rogers: Olbermann has no talent. He has the smart-ass attitude of the intellectual idiot and that's all he has. A smart-ass attitude is the easiest thing there is to maintain. If he really wants to find the worst person he should buy a mirror. (See how easy it is?)
