What has been glaringly absent during the several weeks of coverage leading up to the much-anticipated non-binding U.S. Senate resolution "apologizing" for more than a century's failure to pass anti-lynching legislation, is one simple, all-too-easy-to-forget, bit of "trivia": Those southern Senators who spent a century or so filibustering the legislation to death were actually Democratic Senators.  Rely upon the coverage by the Olde Media, though, and you'll never know it. 

In her report of the Senate's voice vote approving the resolution of apology, Ana Radelat of Gannett finds the fact that the Senators who defeated the legislation for some time were Democrats is not relevant to the story.  As for the culpable Senators who prevented anti-lynching legislation from coming to a vote (sound familiar?), Ms. Radelat refers to them only as "powerful Southern lawmakers."

But why is the simple fact of party identity of the anti-"anti-lynching" Senators so important?  Primarily, because the story surrounding a century's failure to pass something as common-sensical as legislation to outlaw the "stringing-up" of African-Americans requires the appreciation for the identity of the offending parties.  In this case, the Democrats.  The Democratic Party is commonly (though inaccurately) portrayed by the Olde Media as the Party of civil rights.  Historically, it clearly was not.  The story of the anti-lynch laws is part of that history. 

To omit the fact that it was Democrats, and not the now Democratically-reviled Republican Party, who prevented passage of the legislation for so long, represents extremely biased reporting.  It places Democratic responsibility for that which the Senate is now "apologizing" into the context of a blurry, far far distant past, where the party affiliation of the offenders is so obscured by the dark recesses of journalistic memory as to make it inconsequential.  There can be little doubt that had the responsible "southern Senators" been Republicans, this fact would have featured prominently as an essential element of this, and other Olde Media reports.

Radelat's own historical account ironically notes that throughout the years, and numerous unsuccessful attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation, the failure can be attributed to the "use of the filibuster" to derail any vote.

Item: "Senate Issues an apology for Inaction on Lynchings"
Source: Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2005; By Mary Curtius

Similarly, is the treatment of the same story by Mary Curtius of the L.A. Times, who also refers only to "Senators" or "southern Senators."  Writes Curtius, "Each time the House passed an anti-lynching bill, Southern senators  filibustered them."  Again, no indication whatsoever that the filibustering Senators were Democrats.

Item: "Senate Notes Its Inaction on Lynchings"
Source: Associated Press, June 14, 2005; By Jim Abrams

In an even more egregious example of leftist bias, writer Jim Abrams of the Associated Press put his nose to his Democratic agenda and refers not just to "Senators," or even the fairly ambiguous, though misleading, "southern Senators"...Abrams chooses to mislead his readers down the garden path of confusion, by terming the Democratic Senators of the hundred years following the Civil War as "southern conservatives".  Despite "nearly 200 antilynching bills...introduced in Congress, and three passed the House," as well as the urging of "seven presidents between 1890 and 1952," crafts author Abrams, "the Senate, with Southern conservatives wielding their filibuster powers, refused to act."

A more dishonestly written, liberally-biased piece could not have been conjured from the heart of this story than Abrams has produced.  His use of the term "Southern conservatives," while perhaps somewhat a historically accurate term for Southern Democrats during much of the period referenced (1890 to 1952), is a phrase which Mr. Abrams has to know will be misinterpreted by his 2005 audience as referring to present-day Republicans.  Honest reporting requires the use of terminology not calculated to mislead and prejudice readers into believing that these "filibusterers" of proposed anti-lynch laws were Republicans and not Democrats. 

As alluded to earlier, this is a particularly despicable tactic employed by Mr. Abrams, inasmuch as it is today's Democrats who filibuster to block judicial nominees from coming to a vote, just as yesterday's Democrats filibustered to block anti-lynch laws from coming to a vote.  Mr. Abrams and the others act to protect today's Democrats from responsibility for the actions of their party's anti-lynch law filibusters, while generally endorsing, as rank-and-file members of the Olde Media, Democratic propaganda that only extremists would seek to end filibusters.  At the same time, Abrams seeks to protect Democrats by, in effect, portraying the anti-lynch law-killing filibusters as being the product of Republicans.

Item: "The Senate's Apology"
Source: The Washington Post, June 14, 2005; unattributed

Themselves cloaked in anonymity, the Post's editorial staff likewise cloaks the southern Democrats who defeated anti-lynching legislation in anonymity, noting only that "on all three occasions, the Senate, captured by southern filibusterers, talked the anti-lynching bills to death."  In its usual pompous manner, the Post lectures that "it is never too late or too untimely, however, for a great nation to remember terrible wrongs, and lynching was a crime of national proportion." 

It is, however, obviously too late, in the Post's estimation to expose to the light of day the identities of those responsible for talking "to death" legislation that may have saves hundreds if not thousands of lives.