As Media Matters has documented, Fox News and conservative media figures have used the phony scandal surrounding the Justice Department's treatment of the New Black Panther Party to engage in blatant race-baiting. Yesterday, Dave Weigel ripped Fox News for their “minstrelsy” obsession with both the case and the New Black Panther Party. Today, in a post at The New Republic, Jon Chait highlights Fox News' attempts to use the case to “exploit racial fears against Obama”:

What you're starting to see from Fox News now, though, is the most widespread and mainstream right-wing effort to exploit racial fears against Obama. The putative issue is the claim that the Obama Justice Department is failing to prosecute a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. If you're interested in the merits of the case, which are extremely flimsy, a good rundown can be found at Fourth Branch. Even if the conservative interpretation of this event were actually true, it's obviously a tiny matter. Nobody has produced a voter who even claims to have been intimidated -- the voters at the polling station were virtually all black anyway -- nor is there any credible claim of anything remotely approaching a systematic attempt to intimidate white voters at the polls.

[...]

At a recent town hall meeting, conservative protesters exploded with rage when Democratic Congressman Brad Sherman denied that Obama's Justice Department has a policy of never prosecuting African-Americans. There has been a great deal of right-wing insanity unleashed over the last year and a half, but this is the first time that the fear has an explicitly racial cast. You now have the largest organ of movement conservatism promoting Limbaugh's idee fixe that the Obama administration represents black America's historical revenge against whites.

Previously:

Weigel: Fox News' “minstrelsy” fixation on the New Black Panther Party resembles Nixon-era race-baiting

“21st century Willie Horton”: Right-wing race-baiting and the phony New Black Panthers scandal