Politics

Ebony duped by false claim about tea party Trayvon boycott

Patrick Howley Political Reporter
Font Size:

Ebony magazine Wednesday condemned the tea party based on a false rumor that the tea party is planning to boycott the black culture magazine over its cover featuring Trayvon Martin’s family and other Martin supporters.

“We have so many Tea Party readers and followers. To lose all zero of them due to our September cover would be devastating,” Ebony magazine, the Chicago-based glossy periodical, tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

Ebony was referring to the four different covers of its September “We Are Trayvon” issue.

 

ebonyspikelee

One version of the cover features Martin’s parents and brother, while others feature Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade, actor Boris Kodjoe (apparently he was in the Resident Evil movies?) and director Spike Lee, who famously tweeted out the wrong address for Martin’s killer George Zimmerman in 2012, forcing an unsuspecting couple to flee their home in terror.

The conservative outlet Twitchy criticized the magazine for explicitly using Martin’s death to call for the repeal of Stand Your Ground self-defense laws. A single commenter on Breitbart.com reportedly called for a boycott of the magazine, according to disgraced U.S. News and World Report journalist Elizabeth Flock, which kicked off a liberal meme that conservatives were staging some kind of racist boycott of the magazine.

ebonytrayvonfamily

“Sadly, it was immediately clear that no discernible group of Tea Partiers had actually vowed to join the notional boycott. So where did these rumors come from? The first mention of any proposed boycott of Ebony (limited to today) appeared in a single comment on Breitbart.com. A few hours later, this was passed off with complete credulity by U.S. News & World Report,” wrote Gawker.

Flock, the U.S. News and World Report journalist that printed the sentiment of the lone Breitbart commenter, previously published an inaccurate story at the Washington Post claiming that Mitt Romney was using a KKK slogan in his speeches. Flock resigned from the Post in 2012 after a “significant ethical lapse” described by other journalists as an act of plagiarism.

Follow Patrick on Twitter