Fox News reporters Greg Jarrett and Ed Henry speak truth* to power:

, by three African American teenagers

The issue exposed by Jarrett and Henry? The fact that President Obama has not made any public statements on the murder of college baseball player Christopher Lane, who was white. (See my update below: The teenagers who murdered Lane weren't all African American.)

Why do they think this is notable? Because Obama did offer public comments after Trayvon Martin was killed, and after (in Jarrett's words) "the black Harvard professor" got arrested inside his home (Jarrett might not know it, but that professor—Henry Louis Gates—has a name).

In the Jarrett-Henry world, this is is hypocrisy, and it proves that President Obama is a virulent anti-white racist who secretly supports the random murder of white people—as long as the murders are committed by non-whites. Never mind the fact that Obama's mother was white, or that his comments on Gates and Jarrett came in response to questions from reporters. Clearly, Paul LePage was right: Obama hates white people.

Of course, Gates and Jarrett completely ignore the fact that when Trayvon Martin was killed, George Zimmerman—the admitted killer—wasn't arrested until weeks after the murder. Lane's murderers were arrested within 24 hours. That's exactly as should be. His murder was awful, and nothing can change that. But the justice system is working. Without the outrage following Martin's murder, Zimmerman never would have had to defend himself in a court of law.

Jarrett and Henry aren't alone; Fox has spent much of they day posing various forms of the "where's the outrage question" and much of the rest of the conservative media is joining in as well. But these guys don't care about Christopher Lane, or really even about what President Obama did or didn't say. As James David Dickson writes in the Detroit News:



The “where’s the outrage?” argument comes in another form: Why don’t black people protest black-on-black violence? What about all those dead kids in Chicago and Detroit? Where’s the march for them? This is an argument steeped in ignorance. If the people who make it spent even a minute researching, they’d see their premise was faulty. The reason they don’t know that people do care and do march to stop black-on-black violence is because they don’t care about black-on-black violence. They’re trying to use dead black kids in Chicago to stop you from caring about a dead black kid in Florida, when in reality they care about neither.

That's exactly right. Ultimately, this outrage is manufactured to make the Fox audience feel good about themselves when they turn their heads to injustice. It's about making sure they don't forget that they are the real victims here, because who knows what terrible things might happen to the Republican Party if one day Fox viewers woke up and lost that chip on their shoulder.

*Well, not so much truth as stupid and dishonest race-baiting propaganda.

Wow, it turns out that Fox was even worse than I thought—and that I stupidly fell for part of it. It turns out that the one of the three individuals who murdered Lane was white. So (a) my initial post got that fact wrong, for which I apologize and (b) Fox is even loopier than I originally stated.

Sign our petition demanding that Fox News correct their factual mistake, and cease the despicable race-baiting that has resulted.