The Huffington Post has accused Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and Fox News of falsely injecting race into the story of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane who was murdered last week while jogging in Duncan, Okla.
Police have not ascribed any racial motive to the killing. Two of the alleged perpetrators, Edwards and Luna, are black. Jones is white.
That hasn’t stopped a slew of conservative commentators from insisting that race was an important factor in the shooting. The same voices insist the media is guilty of a massive double-standard — one that traces back to coverage of teen Trayvon Martin’s shooting death in Florida at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer.
Rush Limbaugh used his radio show Wednesday to insist that Lane’s killing was “Trayvon Martin in reverse.” Limbaugh insisted that the “mainstream media’s” failure to cover the racial dimensions of the crime was clear evidence of complicity in “the destruction of American culture and society.” He said one of the accused shooters “worships rappers” and celebrates “thug culture.”
HuffPo then takes aim at the Drudgereport and accuses them of playing the race card in their coverage:
The Drudge Report, meanwhile, dedicated a portion of its left-hand column on Wednesday to the shooting — in the process playing up race, and Trayvon Martin, in its own appraisal of the crime.
This coming from the Huffington Post, a web site that has dedicated an entire section, with its own special masthead, to cover the Trayvon Martin case.