Topic: Media Research Center
It's been more than 30 years since she made claims of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, but the Media Research Center just can't stop obsessing over Anita Hill. Clay Waters served up yet another complaint that she exists in a June 23 post:
On Monday’s edition of the tax-supported Amanpour & Co., airing on PBS and CNN International, host Christiane Amanpour interviewed Anita Hill, a professor and of course the woman who accused now-Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment.
Hill has been hailed in the liberal media since her nationally televised 1991 confrontation with the U.S Senate and Thomas, and Amanpour shoehorned her into her show, ostensibly to talk about the African-American emancipation holiday Juneteenth, but really to bash the Supreme Court and claim affirmative action was a civil right.
First, Amanpour furthered the lie that black history wasn’t being taught in some schools because of conservative backlash to Critical Race Theory.
Actually, in the quote Waters provides to back this up, Amanpour said only that "an honest appraisal of black history is impossible in many school districts in the country today" and did not mention critical race theory. But back to complaining about Hill:
After Hill said she had tried to put herself in her enslaved ancestor’s mindset, thinking about voting rights and education and sexual harassment, a list of issues that gave Amanpour a convenient lead-in to bring up the alleged “assault on voting rights, the reversal of women’s rights” happening today as if there was any comparison to the slavery era and 2023.
Waters sneered that "Hill conflated preferential racial treatment under affirmative action to a 'protected right,'" then complained that "Amanpour asked Hill about Justice Clarence Thomas’s current “ethics questions,” as if Hill could possibly provide an objective viewpoint on Thomas." Yet Waters seems to want us to believe that he's offering an objective viewpoint on Hill despite his employment with a right-wing activist organization.
A July 1 "flashback" post by Geoffrey Dickens rehashed right-wing grievances about Hill:
Conservatives certainly remember the awful treatment Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faced at his 1991 confirmation hearings, including the endless media coverage granted to utterly unproved charges of sexual harassment by a former employee, Anita Hill. At the time, Thomas referred to the televised hearings as a “ high tech lynching” perpetrated by those who would torpedo the conservative jurist’s nomination.
[...]
Given the media mindset of the moment, it was no surprise news organizations leaped to elevate Anita Hill’s harassment allegations, which appeared only after the confirmation hearings had officially ended and Thomas’s nomination had been sent to the Senate floor for what seemed like certain approval. Joe Biden’s Judiciary Committee quickly scheduled new hearings — a last gasp for liberals to try and torpedo the nomination.
And so it goes. The MRC needs to hate Hill in order because right-wingers must have enemies -- and because she criticized an ideologue it loves, Hill is a designated enemy.
