One of my pet theses is that journalists generally treat non-white people as forces of nature, not as morally accountable human beings. Thus, the Associated Press can repeat an outrageous statement like this:
“Last election, 27,000 of us voted, most of us for brother Al Gore,” said Rev. Tom Diamond, of the Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church. “The Republican Party threw out 27,000 African-American votes. By all rights brother Al Gore is the president-elect.”
The Rev. Diamond is, of course, one of the Darker People, so reporter Mike Glover doesn’t even bother to explore this “fact.” Under normal circumstances, a journalist would start asking questions such as: Where does he get the number 27,000? Does he have 27,000 parishioners? When did the Republican Party “throw out” those votes, and when did they do it? Who did it? Et cetera, et cetera.
White politicians (and the good reverend is nothing if not a politician, at least part-time) get those kinds of questions because they’re, y’know, normal people. Republican minority-group members get treated like normal people too, because they forfeit their privileges. But the Darker People aren’t normal. They have emotions (they are often “angry” or “outraged”), but asking them to back up their statements with facts is nonsensical. To most journalists, that’s like like asking the wind why it’s blowing northeast, or the clouds why they are raining today.
why isn’t this a violation of IRS regs?
I assume the church isn’t “electioneering” — that is, explicitly endorsing a candidate. They praise one candidate, and excoriate another, yet there is no formal endorsement. The IRS has always turned a blind eye to these kinds of things in black churches, though to be fair they do occur in white churches, too.