Re-Blogging

AKA this was stolen from another blog:

This is some really, really rank journalism. The Associated Press is badly distorting a speech Barack Obama gave today, giving his words a scary and racially-threatening cast that they simply didn't have in reality.

Here's the headline and lede on the AP's story about Obama's speech:

Obama warns of 'quiet riot' among blacks

HAMPTON, Va. (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Tuesday that the Bush administration has done nothing to defuse a "quiet riot" among blacks that threatens to erupt just as riots in Los Angeles did 15 years ago.

The first-term Illinois senator said that with black people from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast still displaced 20 months after Hurricane Katrina, frustration and resentments are building explosively as they did before the 1992 riots.

The loaded language ("warns," "threatens") in the headline and lede -- combined with the obvious insinuation that Obama is somehow threatening that riots may occur -- has already earned this story its pat on the head from Drudge, who made it his lead story for some time today. And CNN is now playing along, too, running the AP's headline about Obama warning of a "quiet riot among blacks" across the screen.

But here's the thing: It's not remotely clear how the AP reporter concluded that this is what Obama was saying.

Here's the relevant text from the actual speech:

Many of the folks in this room know just where they were when the riot in Los Angeles started and tragedy struck the corner of Florence and Normandy. And most of the ministers here know that those riots didn't erupt over night; there had been a "quiet riot" building up in Los Angeles and across this country for years.

If you had gone to any street corner in Chicago or Baton Rouge or Hampton -- you would have found the same young men and women without hope, without miracles, and without a sense of destiny other than life on the edge -- the edge of the law, the edge of the economy, the edge of family structures and communities.

Those "quiet riots" that take place every day are born from the same place as the fires and the destruction and the police decked out in riot gear and the deaths. They happen when a sense of disconnect settles in and hope dissipates. Despair takes hold and young people all across this country look at the way the world is and believe that things are never going to get any better. You tell yourself, my school will always be second rate. You tell yourself, there will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. You tell yourself, I will never be able to afford a place that I can be proud of and call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, "Not guilty" -- or a hurricane hits New Orleans -- and that despair is revealed for the world to see.

Obama is actually making a subtle and interesting point. He's not saying that "quiet riots" are actual riots or that the quiet riots inevitably produce the actual ones. By contrast, he's saying that "quiet riots" aren't riots -- they are things that devastate communities, such as crime, joblessness, localized violence, and inner-city despair. He's saying that we shouldn't need high-profile events like Katrina or the Los Angeles riots to alert us to the "quiet riots" that have been going on in the background for years and years.

Nor is Obama saying, as the AP claims, that the quiet riot currently "threatens to erupt" into new riots comparable to the ones in Los Angeles. That idea simply isn't in the speech. The AP just dreamed it up. As a result, Obama suddenly sounds like he's trafficking in the sort of rhetoric that conservatives love to get outraged about: That we'd best minister to inner city problems lest we have another big riot on our hands. Obama just didn't say this at all.

Shameful, profoundly incompetent garbage. Just awful.