The Media & White Supremacy: A Mutually-Beneficial Relationship

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News outlets across the country have dedicated themselves in the last two weeks to broadcasting and publishing daily articles in condemnation of President Trump, the “alt-right”, and today’s Unite the Right rally. But despite their harsh words, the common enemy of white supremacy that they present to the American public does not grow any weaker. It can’t; it’s already as weak as it can get. In fact, the constant, up to the minute coverage of white supremacy serves as advertising, and is reminiscent of the mutually beneficial relationship held between newspapers and the KKK, nearly 100 years ago.

In his book, A Short History of Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan has been described by Eric Foner, one of the most prominent Civil War-era historians, as the “Terrorist arm of the Democratic Party” for their role in upholding the single-party South’s interest in suppressing, intimidating, and murdering Black Americans during the Reconstruction of the late 1860’s. It was with the passage of the Ku Klux Act of 1871 that President Ulysses S. Grant had brought the full force of martial law to nine counties in South Carolina, and other locations in the South, in order to stamp out these terrorists. By the end of the Reconstruction in 1882, the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Act to be unconstitutional, but its effect had been devastating; the KKK had been all but completely destroyed.

It wouldn’t be until the Roaring Twenties that the KKK would see a resurgence, following President Wilson’s choice of Birth of a Nation as the first film to be screened in the White House, and the subsequent exposés in newspapers which, for seven years, made the KKK a household name again.

President Wilson’s role in the rebirth of the Klan is undisputed; the Virginian son of former Klan members who moved to New Jersey in order to attend Princeton brought his prejudices with him to the North, and when he became President he was more than glad to honour the terrorist arm of his political party by screening a film which positively dramatizes the assassination of Lincoln, and presents the KKK as a heroic force. DW Griffith’s film was a re-writing of history which catered to the disenfranchised Democrats of the North and South, whose loss in the Civil War still stung even half a century later.

But President Wilson and DW Griffith can only be granted a part of the responsibility for making white supremacy a household topic. The Klan had been reinvigorated, and adopted the white, hooded robes of the film; but their numbers would not begin to grow past the thousands until 1921, when every newspaper was a tabloid, and the sensationalism which the Klan could provide was found on every front page.

One newspaper, the New York World, is credited with increasing the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party’s ranks by an estimate of 200,000 new members, following the three-week front page publications about the Klan. Though the coverage was a daily denunciation of their ideology, hooded secrecy, and propensity to violence, the New York World’s tabloid-style journalism and sensationalist bent benefitted the Klan in the long run -- as well as benefitted the newspaper’s profits.

The newspaper had even printed a copy of the Klan’s Application for Membership, leading many readers to clip the application out, fill it in, and send off their ten dollars to become a “protected citizen of the Invisible Empire.”

While most historians rightly credit the stock market collapse of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression for destroying the the KKK’s resurgence, the media had given Pulitzer Prizes to its members who reported on the KKK and took such a bold stance against them. They patted themselves on the back and congratulated themselves for defeating the Klan, despite the exact opposite being true; the New York World alone had bolstered the terrorist organization’s numbers to levels unimaginable after the Reconstruction Era, and every newspaper which syndicated from it only added to those numbers.

But the newspapers gained hundreds of thousands more readers. Their profits skyrocketed. Having a bogeyman, a common enemy to put before the eyes of the public was just as beneficial to the newspapers, as receiving free advertising, and even payments from the newspapers for staged photographs, was for the Klan.

There is no such thing as "bad press."

The media giants of today seem to have forgotten this age-old wisdom, as thousands pour into Washington, DC, in hopes of capturing a Nazi being punched on camera; such a sensationalist video would undoubtedly grant them huge benefits both in readership and advertising dollars. But they are making the same mistake as the New York World did in 1921; they think everyone who reads what they say will agree with them, and take what they say as gospel, rather than clipping out the application form to mail in for themselves.

They haven’t even considered the results of recent condemnations, such as the banning of Alex Jones from Facebook, iTunes, Spotify, and other social networks; the Streisand Effect was immediate, and drove Jones to the top of the iPhone App Store as well as increased the number of people searching for, and viewing, his content tremendously.

This only leaves us to ask, what will be the results of driving thousands of people into Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, to counter-protest the small group of fifty protestors who stand with Unite the Right? What good does it do, to give such a small protest the megaphone of the mainstream media, and the full force of the media cartel’s publications?

The New York Times and other media outlets have seen large resurgences in subscriptions online, this summer, and with this event they will likely see even more. By broadcasting this event, they share Jason Kessler’s message with the world. This mutually-beneficial relationship between the media and white supremacists will not end well, but we can be sure that Pulitzer Prizes will be awarded to those most responsible should the white supremacy movement grow in the way the Ku Klux Klan did, nearly 100 years ago.

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