If there’s one thing Fox News seems to hate, it’s African Americans exercising their American freedoms of expression. Why, it just seems so un-American to the “fair and balanced” network!
Bill O’Reilly sent his ally in Blacks Behaving Badly tropes, producer Jesse Watters, to a New York Jets game on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of 9/11. The goal was to “sample the controversy” about Colin Kaepernick and other athletes' civil rights protest of refusing to stand for the national anthem.
Just in case you thought Watters might be at all impartial, Fox set us straight in the opening moments of the video when we saw him standing and singing the anthem, hand over his heart, along with a sea of white people. There was one African American face, seen at the beginning, as if designed to inoculate the segment from cries of racism.
The overwhelming majority of people Watters interviewed in the video were white. He asked an African American woman, “Don’t you think he [Kaepernick] should respect the people that serve and protect you?” Watters did not ask her or anyone else about how they feel about the disproportionately large number of unarmed African Americans shot and killed by police. He didn’t even mention it, even though that is, in large part, the basis of Kaepernick’s protest.
After this biased segment, Watters chatted with O’Reilly in the studio. O’Reilly opined that if he owned the San Francisco 49ers, Kaepernick's team, he’d tell Kaepernick to have a “separate press conference” to air his political views and then ban “any political displays once you’re on the field.”
Watters agreed that would be a fair solution.
Then O’Reilly began to attack a Kansas City Chiefs player for making a Black Power salute but, apparently, thought better of it.
O’REILLY: In Kansas City, the Chiefs player did a Black Power salute – on 9/11. I mean, that’s – that’s not a…
O’Reilly didn’t finish his sentence.
“No,” Watters nevertheless agreed.
But we knew what O’Reilly meant. It came out more explicitly in his closing statement:
O’REILLY: The kids are getting involved with this now so it’s gonna have to stop, I believe, and we’ll see.
Watch it above, from the September 12, 2016 The O’Reilly Factor.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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