Far-right site gains influence in Obama era

On April 12, the conservative website WorldNetDaily published an expose on newly appointed White House “green czar” Van Jones that labeled the environmental activists “an admitted radical communist and black nationalist leader.”

Based on readily available online sources, including an alternative weekly paper in Oakland, Calif., Aaron Klein’s piece had a sensational title: ”Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green?”–and a sensational spin. In the 2005 profile of Jones that Klein cited, reporter Eliza Strickland recalled Jones’s first year out of Yale Law School, working for the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in the Bay Area, and how when he was “observing the first large rally since the lifting of the city’s state of emergency, he got swept up in mass arrests,” then came to sympathize with the black radicals and communists who’d been arrested with him, before leaving them behind to become an environmental activist. In Klein’s hands, the story took on a different, more sinister tone: “Jones said he first became radicalized in the wake of the 1992 Rodney King riots, during which time he was arrested.”

Klein’s story made some small waves online, but it wasn’t picked up by the mainstream media until July 23. That was when Glenn Beck first told his Fox News audience about Jones. “This is a guy who is a self-avowed communist,” said Beck, “and he is in the Obama administration … this guy wasn’t a radical, and then was arrested. He spent six months in jail, came out a communist.”

Read more at Michigan Messenger’s sister site, the Washington Independent