As Democrats ponder their newly vulnerable electoral state, here’s The New York Times headline that’s a neat encapsulation of media bias: “Republicans Pounce on Schools as a Wedge Issue to Unite the Party.” That’s the online headline to the front-page Thursday story by Lisa Lerer and Jeremy Peters.
It’s two liberal media tropes in one line: the idea of Republicans cynically “pouncing” on defenseless Democrats, and the idea of Republicans using a sinister, surely discreditable “wedge issue” to win votes from the gullible. The blurb on the nytimes.com web page all but accused Republicans, including winning Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, of stoking white resentment: “Rallying around what it calls ‘parental rights,’ the party is stoking white resentment and tapping into broader anger at the education system.”
The story itself wasn’t much better, notwithstanding a few nods to the genuine parental outrage against Democratic factions like teachers unions:
After an unexpectedly strong showing on Tuesday night, Republicans are heading into the 2022 midterm elections with what they believe will be a highly effective political strategy capitalizing on the frustrations of suburban parents still reeling from the devastating fallout of pandemic-era schooling.
The new power of education is being seized upon as an issue wedge. Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.
But it’s the free-floating rage of parentsMany of these people felt left by the government in the worst months during the pandemic. This was a result of off-year elections and became one of the strongest drivers for Republican candidates.
It TimesWhile trying to turn it into a black-on-black race issue, Lerer and Peters softpedaled the pernicious nature Critical Race Theory which is a cult that teachers have been exposed to and which rewrites how history and race are discussed at schools. Here are Lerer and Peters sounding a bit like MSNBC’s crazed Joy Reid:
This message was transmitted on two frequency. Glenn Youngkin (the Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia) pushed a message of more parental control. He stoked the anger and fear of some voters of color, who were alarm by attempts to educate them about the history of racism in America. He attacked Critical Race Theory is a framework for graduate schools that has been used as a shorthand to describe a heated debate about how to deal with race. Then he published an advert. that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to “Beloved,” the canonical novel about slavery by the Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
But at the same time, Mr. Youngkin and other Republicans tapped into broader dissatisfaction among moderate voters about teachers’ unions, unresponsive school boards, quarantine policies and the instruction parents saw firsthand during months of remote learning….
Peters and Lerer tried again to justify parental outrage about closed schools for white racism: Instead, “While the conservative media and Republican candidate stirred the stewof anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams…”
The parents finally came to terms with the fact that Virginia schools are amongst the most difficult to reopen.
Already, the effects of remote learning on parents have been severe: School closures drove millions of parents out of the work force, led to an increase in mental health problems among children and worsened existing educational inequalities. Key members of the Democratic base (including women, Black and Latino families) were most affected by many of these effects.
After noting that when Democrat McAuliffe “appeared with Randi Weingarten, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers,” who helped keep schools shuttered for a year, it “drew rebukes from Republicans,” the reporters admitted that thanks to teachers unions and school boards, “Virginia was among the East Coast states that were slowest to reopen schools for full-time, in-person learning.”
About Post Author
