'Unbiased' S.C. Fox Report on Racist Website Slammed

Last August, the South Carolina Broadcasters Association named local Carolina Fox reporter Tami Birckner "South Carolina Reporter of the Year." Three months later, Birckner won the gushing accolades of neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen with a puff piece on the racist Web site Stormfront, which aired on Fox Carolina Channel 21 Nov. 9.

At the beginning of her chirpy report, for which she interviewed no critics of Stormfront, Birckner described Stormfront as "a Web site with everything from dating advice and homemaking threads to discussion boards that focus on news that white activists want to know."

She then interviewed Stormfront senior moderator Jamie Kelso, who said, "We're called anti-Semitic, we're called neo-Nazi, we're called racist, but we're none of that."

Letting Kelso go unchallenged with that claim was ludicrous at best. Stormfront's content is transparently racist and anti-Semitic on a massive scale. The same week Birckner's story aired, one typical Stormfront post declared, "Jews are the HIV of civilization. N------ are just the opportunistic infections." Another user wrote, "As far as I'm concerned, Martin Luther King's just another dead n-----. At least the dead ones can't try to move into white neighborhoods."

Either Birckner barely even glanced at the site before reporting her story, or she deliberately misinformed her viewers

In her story, Birckner called Stormfront, "a safe forum for people to use without fear of retaliation." The week after the story aired, Birckner apparently began using the forum herself as Kelso welcomed "our newest Stormfront member, FOXSC." Responding to an outpouring of gratitude and "Thank you Tami Birckner" messages from neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other white supremacists, FOXSC posted this message: "I am the FOX Carolina reporter who reported this story. I hope this can show those of you who have little faith in the media that there are journalists who take pride in being factual and unbiased."

Fox Carolina station managers apparently didn't see it the same way once criticism started to pour in. They quickly scrubbed Birckner's story from the station's Web site after bloggers spread it around the Web as evidence of Fox News' racist leanings.

One of them, "Jesus' General," publicized a copy of a complaint letter he sent the news managers. "I can't wait to see what you come up with next," he wrote. "Will it be a sweeps week series on the lust brown people have for white women? Or will you tackle the problem of Jewish control of the banking industry first?"

Birckner did not respond to three E-mail and voicemail messages seeking comment for this report. A receptionist told a caller in mid-February that Birckner no longer works at Fox Carolina, which is broadcast by WHNS-TV in Greenville, because she was "promoted to another station."

If Birckner has been called up to the Fox big leagues, she'll be in position to compare notes with Fox News' talking head James Pinkerton, who is likewise no stranger to pumping up the cause of white supremacists. A regular contributor on both "Fox News Watch" and the "Fox and Friends" morning show, Pinkerton, a regular Newsday columnist, wrote a column for the Dec. 5 issue of The American Conservative magazine in which he heaped praise on The Camp of the Saints, a racist French novel by Jean Raspail. First published in 1973, it describes the takeover of Europe by "swarthy hordes" of "cholera-ridden and leprous wretches."

"First to arrive were the monsters, the grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta," the book details. "As they groveled through the wet sand like a pack of basset hounds ... with their snorts and grunts of joy, they looked like an army of little green men from some remote planet."

In his column, "Suicide of a Nation," Pinkerton writes that Raspail predicted the gradual takeover of Europe and America by filthy, lecherous, brown-skinned invaders. "While Raspail did not know the specifics of Vicente Fox's slow-motion demographic crusade to recapture much of America for Mexico, he apprehended the general truth," Pinkerton writes.

That truth, Pinkerton explains, is that, like the French in Raspail's novel, white Americans today "are lacking a proper sense of national-racial consciousness, the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest."

Kelso couldn't have said it better himself.