Politics

NAACP seemingly abandons Tea Party tracking website

Matthew Boyle Investigative Reporter
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The NAACP hasn’t updated its teapartytracker.org website since October 20, and hasn’t tweeted from its special TeaPartyTracker handle since August 30.

This might mean the NAACP has decided the Tea Party movement isn’t racist after all. When the NAACP launched the website, which was meant to monitor “racism and other forms of extremism within the Tea Party movement,” it said, “our hope is that this site remains empty—that the Tea Party’s initial steps toward monitoring extremism within their ranks bear fruit. But if not, the NAACP will be there, as we have for more than one hundred years, to expose racism where it exists, in whatever form it takes.”

Well, there haven’t been any updates to the site since mid-October, and the website’s main video, one from the misleading “journalistic” duo of New Left Media, has held its place at the top of the site since late August.

Since the NAACP said it will be there to “expose racism where it exists, in whatever form it takes,” when the organization is not producing that content, does that mean the NAACP is admitting there is no racism to be exposed, in any form, in the Tea Party?

The NAACP failed to respond to The Daily Caller’s request for comment or clarification.

Think Progress editor Faiz Shakir told TheDC in August that the NAACP could use his publication’s content on teapartytracker.org but that Think Progress was not producing content specifically for the NAACP website. In a more recent interview, Shakir told TheDC that he hasn’t been contacted by anyone from the NAACP about teapartytracker.org in a long time.

“From the beginning until now, our role has always been the same: we produce content that we think is important, and NAACP’s staffers will take whatever content they like of ours and promote it on their site,” Shakir said in an e-mail. “I’ve never had anything to do with the site, and haven’t talked to any organizer of that site for months. It’s an NAACP-run site, so you should ask them what’s going on with it.”

Since October 20, Think Progress has published content questioning the Tea Party movement’s views of Islam, fellow teapartytracker.org contributing organization, Media Matters, has attacked the Tea Party movement on racial lines via an attack on Fox News and New Left Media has added a video to its YouTube page. So, even though the NAACP’s “contributing organizations” continue to attack the Tea Party movement, the NAACP has, for some reason, ceased publishing those stories on Tea Party tracking site.

A Media Matters spokesperson did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment.