As it turns out, it looks like Cleaver had a lot of help pushing his imaginary racial incident on the mainstream media. More and more independent voices are looking into the incident, and what they’re finding is pretty unsavory: a deliberate effort was made to take Cleaver’s claims and get them uncritically repeated in the press. It starts with William Douglass, a writer for McClatchy newspapers. From Jack Cashill:
When I heard the accounts of Cleaver, Congressman Lewis and others, I did not necessarily disbelieve them, but I decided to check the source, a piece in the notoriously liberal McClatchy papers by one William Douglas, and I began to see how the record was being twisted.
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I presumed that the available videotaped evidence would support Cleaver’s claim. It has not. The “chorus” of the people in the video is clearly saying “Kill the Bill.” Chances are that Douglas edited his comments to suggest that the “chorus” was shouting racial epithets. If Douglas did this, he should be fired.
Cashill gives Cleaver the benefit of the doubt on the “chorus” remarks, but it’s worth noting that Cleaver never disavowed them or tried to set the record straight. Cleaver only started to back down on his allegations about spitting after video directly revealed that his account was less than honest. The American Thinker writes:
Once the videos emerged, Cleaver would tell the Washington Post that the man "allowed saliva to hit my face."
Keep in mind that this was only the last version of a story that repeatedly changed. First the protester was arrested and Cleaver didn’t want to press charges, then the protester was detained but not arrested because Cleaver didn’t want to identify him, and now we hear this this:
"There were no elements of a crime, and the individual wasn't able to be positively identified," a spokeswoman for the Capitol Police would tell FoxNews.com. "[Cleaver] was unable to positively identify."
There were no elements of a crime? That's certainly different than what Cleaver told the nation. Remember from the video, posted before on The Source, that the incident happened right in front of a police officer. Cleaver returned to the scene about thirty seconds after it happened with a different police officer, and couldn’t even find the man who was right in front of him.
Getting caught lying is no fun at all.
So when we look at say, the work of Kansas City columnist Yael T Abouhalkah, we have to wonder if his coverage was deliberately dishonest or just a shameful collapse of journalistic standards:
Despite the slightness of the evidence, the seemingly omniscient Yael T. Abouhalkah, the Editorial Page columnist in Cleaver’s hometown Kansas City Star, a McClatchy paper, was able to conclude that “some Tea Party supporter spat on Cleaver Saturday on Capitol Hill because the U.S. congressman is black.”
If there were a spitting incident, it is clear that the spitter had to be someone other than the shouter of racial slurs. That Abouhalkah can impute racism to someone he does not know, even by name, who may or may not have spit, is testament to the shabby, subversive state of contemporary journalism.
Jack Cashill's great article makes one thing clear: Cleaver is the tip of the sword in a much larger effort to discredit the Tea Parties by disseminating false reports of racial incidents. Cleaver started a chain reaction by lying, and then he did nothing to stop it.
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