Duck reality, dog the media: It's the old game in AL if the news isn't going your way (Sharp/al.com)

Blaming the media is tried and true political strategy in Alabama
Updated Nov 17; Posted Nov 17

By John Sharp
jsharp@al.com

For the past week, as media from around the world swarmed the Roy Moore scandal, a question arose again and again.

How, wondered the shoe-leather scribes and studio celebrities, could Alabama's conservative voters support Moore after a bombshell Washington Post story telling of allegations that the ex-judge pursued and accosted teen girls decades ago?
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"They had a built-in distrust and they felt it validated and reinforced in the allegations against Roy Moore," Sullivan said, telling of listeners who find it fishy that a sensational story could sit quiet for years, only to be found just a month from election day by The Washington Post.
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"It's a well-established tradition for many Southerners, particularly more reactionary Southerners, to dismiss even the starkest truths when they are revealed by news organizations from outside the South," said Hank Klibanoff, professor of practice in creative writing and English at Emory University in Atlanta. He is a co-author of the "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.
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"The liberal biases of the establishment media have been obvious for decades, and resented by conservatives and Southerners for decades," Hillyer said. ". Now, with Donald Trump stirring up conspiracy theories about 'fake news,' the distrust has turned into widespread, reflexive, unthinking refusal to believe unwanted stories merely and specifically because the stories are broken by establishment-media outlets."
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more: http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2017/11/blaming_the_media_is_tried_and.html




Some very interesting historical context to be found in this article -- AL villains have a long track record of provoking the courts into ruling against them, thus broadening the idea and practice of a free press.

BTW, the last included para is a quote from a conservative columnist.