Some things never change.

There is nothing new about this relationship between the white liberal media and black Americans.

To cite but one example, we have often enough discussed Josephus Daniels in this space. Daniels, the owner of the Raleigh News & Observer, was a leading national figure in progressive politics. Using his North Carolina paper as his base he helped lead the media drum beat for the progressive and segregationist Woodrow Wilson’s presidential candidacy in 1912, being rewarded with an appointment as Secretary of the Navy. Daniels, however, had been on the political scene for a long time by 1912, and frequently unnoticed is his role in what is often described as a white supremacist coup d’état against the elected — and Republican — government of Wilmington, North Carolina [where my dad’s people come from]. The victorious Republicans, (known as “Fusionists” in the day) as described in Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past, immediately set about expanding “voting rights for blacks” among other sins that was at loggerheads with the progressive racial agenda of literacy tests and poll taxes.

Daniels used his newspaper — the leading media outlet of the day in his state — to demand “the subjection of the Negro, politically.…” He would later write, and again I have highlighted the point in bold print:

…. The News and Observer was relied upon to carry the Democratic message and to be the militant voice of White Supremacy, and it did not fail in what was expected, sometimes going to extremes in its partisanship. Its correspondents visited every town where the Fusionists were in control and presented column after column day by day of stories of every Negro in office and every peculation, every private delinquency of a Fusion office-holder.

Meaning: The leading liberal media outlet of the day in North Carolina — in 1898! — was used to do to “every Negro in office” what was done almost a century later to Clarence Thomas and what is now being done to Ben Carson and others.

The objective of the progressive editor Daniels, openly stated and quoted at length by Bartlett, was:

The subjection of the Negro, politically….

Which was accomplished in the 1898 Wilmington coup, when, after successfully targeting local blacks for a media lynching that echoes that of Thomas many decades later, in Bartlett’s words, “Democrats forced the lawfully elected Republican leaders of Wilmington, North Carolina, out of office at gunpoint.”

Daniels was a leading advocate of what he himself called “white supremacy” — the direct philosophical connection between slavery and post-Civil War, post-Thirteenth Amendment segregation that provided votes for Democrats. Slavery was about the physical subjugation of blacks, segregation about the political (and social) subjugation of blacks.

So what, then, is the difference between the white-owned liberal media of today — and the white-owned liberal media typified by Daniels (who was hardly alone in his day)? And the mentality that bridges both to the holocaust that was American slavery?

The point of the whole exercise, in Daniels day or right this minute — as Justice Thomas with typical fearlessness noted at Duquesne — was to make sure that prominent blacks “be picked apart.” Or, as Daniels said, it was about “the subjection of the Negro.” --- Jeffery Lord in The American Spectator 5/7/13.

[One thing about Daniels as Sec. of the Navy, he made sure the Navy was totally segregated, to the point that blacks could not gain technical or weapons ratings. Without access to these jobs there could be no pathways to demonstrate honor or bravery. Blacks were allowed to sail but only as mess stewards.]