The mayor in question is Tiffany Henyard of Dolton, Illinois, a village just south of Chicago with a population of approximately 21,000 people. I guess it's quite possible that she's bad at her job. Here's an excerpt from the Fox story:
Henyard has been accused of misdeeds ranging from weaponizing police in retaliatory business raids to spending taxpayer money on luxuries like traveling to Las Vegas. Last month, Henyard reportedly vetoed the board’s resolution to probe her spending over purported misuse of funds.Okay, all that is bad if true, but ... Henyard is the mayor of a small village in Illinois. Why does she merit coverage from Fox, the Daily Caller, the Missouri-based Gateway Pundit, and RedState?
While the FBI has allegedly already begun to investigate Henyard for purportedly misusing her local police force, the board’s resolution had called for the FBI to do further investigation into her spending of the town’s money....
One woman approached the microphone, warning the audience, "I apologize if I seem irate, I had my radiation today, I have cancer, of course I do. Tiffany stole money from a cancer foundation. How dare you? How dare you steal, and I helped you with your campaign, how dare you steal from us? I have to buy my wigs, are you going to reimburse me for the wigs that I've been spending my money on?"
She appeared to be referring to the "Tiffany Henyard CARES Foundation," which, per the acronym, stands for Cancer And Remission Empowering Survivors. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has reportedly begun to crack down on this purported cancer charity for not being transparent about its financial reports.
Well, she's a Black woman, and Dolton is a 91% Black community. Fox accompanies its story with a stereotypical angry-Black-woman photo:
And she's a Democrat (previous Fox headline: "Controversial Democrat Mayor Under Investigation After Wild Tirades, Police Raids, Lavish Spending"). She also once posted a video of herself with President Biden. So I guess that justifies saturation coverage at Fox -- a search of her name at FoxNews.com turns up 566 hits. Imagine how much coverage she'd get at Fox if her village had 30,000 people!
Then we have this story:
This is a story from the Canadian press about whether a Canadian province will pay for non-traditional gender surgery, but U.S. (and British) right-wing media outlets are all over it. I guess I understand -- it's an opportunity to get the audience angry about gender ideology run amok, and also an opportunity for the media outlets to put the words "Penis" and "Vagina" in headlines. The big surprise to me is that the surgery, if it takes place, will happen in Texas -- where it's been done before:
The Crane Center in Texas offers several non-binary surgical options. “We offer everything you could think of,” Dr. Curtis Crane, a plastic surgeon and reconstructive urologist with fellowship training in transgender surgery, said during a Facebook live Q&A session for patients three years ago. “I can’t think of a time that a patient has come up with a surgical request that I haven’t been able to fulfill.”Has anyone told Greg Abbott?
... Crane argues that vaginoplasty without penectomy surgery is not experimental. “I probably do 10 or so a year; it’s not uncommon,” he said in an interview with National Post.
And there's this:
The Fox headline leaves open the possibility that this dog died as a result of brutal MS-13 thirteen members running wild in the streets!!!! In fact, as the CBS headline notes, this killing took place in a prison. (To be fair, the Fox story's subhed and first paragraph make this clear.) And while it's sad that a police dog was killed, it's not unusual: the dog appears to be the fifth this year to die in the line of duty. As far as I know, however, this is the first K9 this year whose death was deemed worthy of a statement from a governor. But Youngkin is an ambitious Republican, and he knows that the name MS-13 makes GOP voters' blood boil. So I guess you can't blame him.
So right-wingers are getting their minimum daily requirement of ragebait today. Now let's look at a story that got much less attention this week, even though it might have enraged liberals the way these stories enraged conservatives:
Wired reported that a man who atrtempted to commit a terrorist act -- ramming the Atlanta-area FBI office with an SUV -- is a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
... social media accounts seemingly associated with [Erwin] Bolling repeatedly boosted QAnon content and interacted with QAnon promoters, including by posting a link to a now-deleted QAnon-associated YouTube channel alongside the comment: “Release the Kraken”—in direct reference to Sidney Powell’s failed legal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.The Fox, AP, and KDFX stories make no mention of Bolling's social media posts, which, in addition to the Wired story, turn up in the Raw Story post and an NBC story not linked above.
On what’s believed to be Bolling’s Facebook account, there were various posts related to anti-vaccine memes as well.
The accounts also posted in support of former president Donald Trump. In December 2020, “I love you” was posted in response to a post on X from Trump that falsely claimed the election had been rigged by Democrats.
This didn't become a huge story featured in multiple news outlets -- chances are you missed it altogether. The media outlets liberals trust downplay rage-inducingf stories, unless they're about Donald Trump or a few other well-known objects of anger (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, George Santos).
Covering Trump and his D.C.-based acolytes is important -- but maybe we'd benefit from a little more coverage of stories like this one, rather than yet another daily parsing of the probably futile struggle to bring Trump to justice in the courts. Trump and his entourage aren't the only dangers to society.
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