CBS Spotlights Anti-Jeff Sessions Protest at His Alabama Office

Nicholas Fondacaro | January 4, 2017
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Wednesday evening appeared to be CBS’s turn to hype the sit-in protest, orchestrated by the NAACP, at Senator Jeff Sessions’ office in Mobile, Alabama, after ABC was the sole network reporting it that morning. “Six arrests were made last night when protesters from the NAACP staged a sit-in at Jeff Sessions' senate office in Alabama,” announced fill-in anchor Josh Elliott during the lead-in, “They've blasted his record on civil rights and voting rights enforcement.”

Correspondent David Begnaud kicked off his report with the cliché tagline, “The protesters said they were taking a stand by sitting down.” And what they want was for Sessions not to become the next attorney general of the United States.

“Critics like [NAACP protester Bernard] Simelton say Sessions' record as Alabama state attorney general and then federal prosecutor make him unqualified,” noted Begnaud. In a sit-down interview with CBS, Simelton argued, “Ensuring that people like you and I, our civil rights are protected, we do not believe that he will do that.”

The only negative point about Sessions that Begnaug brought up was how, “Simelton points to Sessions admission to the U.S. Senate in 1986 that he had previously called the NAACP un-American for its advocacy tactics.” Other than that, there were no additional examples given in the report for how Sessions was a threat to civil rights and voting rights.

Begnaud did interview William Smith, a friend and colleague of Sessions for the last 20 years. Smith exclaimed, “You won't find anyone who has spent a substantial amount of time with Senator Sessions who would make these allegations, no one!”

But what went unreported was specific positive points about Sessions and race. For instance, ABC News reported in mid-November that Sessions believed there was racial bias in policing. The network quoted him as saying, “I think it is likely that within every department there are some officers who subtly, if not otherwise, are biased in the way they go about enforcing the law. I think that is just life. We know that to be true,”

When Sessions was first nominated by President-elect Donald Trump, The Weekly Standard noted that, as a prosecutor, Sessions feverishly pursued the death penalty for a member of the Ku Klux Klan who kidnapped and murdered an African-American teenager. And after becoming Alabama’s Attorney General he ensured that the perpetrator received the death penalty. 

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