On her Tuesday broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” host Rachel Maddow criticized the Fox News Channel for its reaction to the Department of Justice’s investigation of allegations of civil rights violations within the government of Ferguson, MO, particularly its police department.
Maddow rehashed some of the allegations from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division’s investigation released last week.
“So there’s been a lot of drama, even some reckoning in the last few days because of the Justice Department’s investigation into what’s been going on in this town,” Maddow said. “And the Justice Department’s findings about how black people have been treated by the police and the local court system and these vivid examples of the racist drek that was seen as OK and no big deal, even when top officials were sending it around on their work emails, their official accounts. I mean, this is incredible. Can you imagine get thing at work from your boss? Nobody saying anything about it, nobody thinking this is weird – ‘bare chested group of dancing women, apparently in Africa, Michelle Obama’s high school reunion.’ Imagine getting that at work and everybody thinks no big deal.
Then Maddow expressed her shock in the reaction from Fox News, which she based on a segment from Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File” featuring an interview by host Megyn Kelly of The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens.
“What I did not see coming is how the conservative media would react to this same news. I mean, we’re all working from the same set of facts. But look how this story comes out when you see it on the Fox News Channel.”
Maddow went on to play a portion of the segment in which Kelly questioned the merits of the investigation and said, “If you sic 40 FBI agents on the company and review every email and every document and every communication you can, between the employees, you won’t find any racist emails, any inappropriate comments – and then to tar the entire organization with that, it is additionally problematic.”
Watch the segment in its entirety:
According to Maddow, any correspondence by business email that would include that sort of rhetoric seemed to be an exception and not the norm at American businesses, but left open the possibility it was the norm at the Fox News Channel.
“Very few companies in America where you won’t find photo of bare chested group of women apparently in Africa with the caption, ‘Michelle Obama’s high school reunion,’” she said. “‘The president is a chimpanzee.’ You know what? I don’t get emails like that from my colleagues like that. I don’t work at the Fox News Channel, so I can’t speak to what’s in their employees’ inboxes on a regular basis. But emails depicting President Obama as a chimp, the Michelle Obama’s high school reunion, emails describing a man trying to obtain welfare for his dogs because they are mixed in color.”
“Maybe those kind of emails happen where you work, maybe my office is an outlier,” Maddow continued. “I do not get those types of emails. And if I did get sent something like that at work, I would expect people to get fired. And that is what is in the process of happening right now in Ferguson, Missouri. And apparently at the Fox News Channel, that’s an outrage, because this sort of thing is normal for the American workplace. Very few companies in America are not sending around work emails about lazy unemployed black people and the black president being a monkey. That’s normal, right? That’s American business. Fox News Channel says that’s normal. That I did not see coming.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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