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An avid poster on Internet discussion groups, McCain has aired strong personal views on these subjects. In December, New York Press media critic Michelangelo Signiorile published some of McCain's contributions to FreeRepublic.com, written under the pseudonym BurkeCalhounDabney. McCain asserted that the civil rights movement inspired “black criminality” by encouraging people to get arrested at demonstrations. “I am disturbed … by [Jesse] Jackson's idea that 'breaking white folks' rules' was somehow inherently just,” McCain wrote. “If rules were to be broken merely because they were the work of white folks, then hasn't Jackson gone a long way toward explaining the explosion of black criminality that began in the 1960s?”
Signiorile, who was alerted by a reader to McCain's postings, told the Intelligence Report he was “amazed” by what he found. In one posting, McCain suggested that Harvard University president Lawrence Summers be “persecuted and run out of town” for supporting gay rights. In another, McCain gave his take on interracial relationships: “[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion,” McCain wrote. “The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.”
Shortly after Signiorile's story appeared, and McCain's extremist views began to circulate around journalistic and political circles, every posting by BurkeCalhounDabney was deleted from FreeRepublic.com.
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“[A]s a working journalist with years experience,” McCain once wrote on the League's DixieNet Web site, “I am well aware of how reporters can subtly frame their stories to suggest which side in any controversy is in the right.” McCain's stories for the Times often display this expertise, relying on sources from hate groups without acknowledging the controversial nature of their views - and immediately shooting down any opposing viewpoints, like those of the NAACP leader in McCain's story on Dixie-loving as a “hate crime.”
If McCain's not-so-subtle framing of the news has raised eyebrows around the Times' newsroom, it doesn't appear to have affected the kinds of stories he's assigned to write. In 2000, when African-American writer Lerone Bennett Jr. published a controversial book accusing Abraham Lincoln of being a racist (see “Lincoln Reconstructed” in this issue), McCain wrote an approving feature about the book even though - perhaps unbeknownst to his editors - he had already expressed vehement opinions on the subject.
In an Internet discussion group, McCain had written that Lincoln was a “war criminal” who should have been tried for “treason.” On DixieNet, McCain - using his own name - had even concocted a mock “Wanted” poster for Lincoln, whom he described as the “st RULER and TYRANT of the AMERICAN EMPIRE” and a perpetrator of “Murder, False Imprisonment, and numerous HEINOUS crimes against the SOUTHern states and AMERICANS in general!”
You can read more about this bigot here and here and here