On this morning's Fox & Friends, S.E. Cupp attacked the Washington Post and ABC for its recent poll, which showed that 43 percent of white voters strongly disapprove of Obama's job performance. She accused the Post and ABC of “injecting race where it does not belong” and said, “Shame on the Washington Post and ABC for doing this poll which clearly just serves to agitate racial tensions.” Yes, she had the nerve to accuse the Washington Post and ABC of “agitat[ing] racial tensions” for asking a totally standard polling question while she appeared on Fox News, the network that has been race-baiting almost nonstop for the past two weeks. Then, she had the gall to compare the NAACP to the New Black Panthers Party -- to her, both are just groups that run around “injecting race where it does not belong.”
First of all, as Walter Shapiro attempted to inform Cupp, “Every pollster since time and memorial has asked respondents, 'what is your race?' This is standard political analysis.” Indeed, the recent Washington Post/ABC News poll is hardly the first time that race has been included in a political poll. Virtually every campaign exit polls asks respondents to identify race. Numerous polls have been conducted to determine the support of voters based on their race. And, if you want to accuse a news outlet of “injecting race” into its polls, well, Cupp would have to look no further than Fox News. Take, for instance this February 2008 Fox News poll on the Texas and Ohio Democratic primaries, which broke down voter support for Obama and Hillary Clinton by race: “Blacks back Obama by a wide margin; whites are more likely to back Clinton -- by a slimmer margin, but still by double-digits. In fact, among white men -- an increasingly strong segment for Obama in recent primaries -- Clinton wins by a narrow 3-point margin.” There's also this September 2009 Fox News poll: “Are Obama's Opponents Racists?” Yup, not only did the network go further than asking standard questions on respondents' demographics, they actually framed an entire poll around the question of whether people thought “Obama's Opponents” were “racists.”
In fact, Fox News has a long history not just of breaking down voter preferences by race, but of asking racially loaded questions. For instance, in 2008, Fox News commissioned a poll which asked the question, “Do you think Barack Obama has gotten as far as he has in the presidential race mainly because...1. He is a qualified candidate 2. He is African-American 3. He is an inspirational speaker.” The poll broke down its results by race, measuring how “whites” and “blacks” responded to that question.
And for Cupp to make this accusation on Fox -- a network that has devoted hours upon hours engaging in race baiting by pushing J. Christian Adam's completely bogus claims that the Department of Justice is biased against white voters -- takes a lot of nerve. Let's not forget that this is a network whose rising-star host called the president a “racist.”
From the July 16 broadcast of Fox News' Fox & Friends: