Racism

After Mitt Romney’s comfortable win in the New Hampshire Republican primaries Tuesday, media attention shifts to the next primary, in socially conservative South Carolina, which New York Times campaign reporter Jim Rutenberg claims is “a place famous for surfacing the dark undercurrents of American politics” in his Wednesday front-page story, “In South Carolina, Challenges Await on Ideology and Faith.”

Rutenberg is mainly referring to an alleged incident during the 2000 campaign in which presidential candidate Sen. John McCain was victimized by anonymous phone calls (from either the George W. Bush campaign or Bush supporters) claiming McCain’s dark-skinned adopted daughter from Bangladesh was an illegitimate black love child. But is there hard evidence the smear even occurred? As the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell wrote in a column in January 2008: “No matter that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis couldn’t substantiate how many of these scurrilous phone calls were actually made, or by whom.”

New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, perhaps prodded by criticism from Bernard Goldberg on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night, posted an update Friday afternoon to his Tuesday blog post offensively accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking Obama to delay for one night an address to Congress last September.

Unrepentant, Rosenthal berated some of his critics for being “overtly racist themselves, including bigoted references to my last name.”

Rosenthal's only regret, apparently, was that he did not mention “that racially tinged and outright racist attacks did not begin with the election of Mr. Obama,” and brought up an old favorite he had previously written about, the Willie Horton ad used in the 1988 presidential campaign against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. (Never mind that it was Al Gore who brought up the ad in the first place.)

Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Evan Thomas - formerly of Newsweek - made claims about the existence of "angry, white, middle class" men in the Republican Party who are "seething."

And fellow panel member and Washington Post columnist Colby King accused GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum of "pandering" to a racist view "that black people are just shiftless, lazy and hands out" because of a recent comment in which Santorum appeared to bring up "black people" who receive welfare benefits, although the former Pennsylvania Senator denies that he used the word "black." (Video below)

On the campaign trail, Republican candidate Rick Santorum blurted out a word that sounded like "black" and was widely-criticized for making a generalization that black citizens rely on welfare. Though the transcript of the remark is not entirely certain, CNN's Anderson Cooper emphasized the comment anyway with a "Keeping Them Honest" report on his Thursday show.

The title "Keeping Them Honest" implies that the subject is being dishonest, but Cooper admitted that he was grilling Santorum for "what he appears to be saying." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

CBS's Early Show repeatedly hit GOP candidate Newt Gingrich on Friday over his comments on African-Americans and food stamps. The network played the quote for African-American Congressman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and engaged Gingrich over the context, even accusing him of trying to start a class war.

"You've accused President Obama of trying to start a class war," co-host Nancy Cordes told Gingrich in an interview at the bottom of the 7 a.m. hour. "Aren't you doing the same thing?" she pressed him. [Video below the break.]

While various liberal media outlets have been busy trying to smear former senator Rick Santorum as a racist for supposedly saying, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money," at a campaign event, other intellectually honest liberals have rendered a different verdict.

One of them, Mediaite writer Tommy Christopher, noted today how "Young Turks" co-host Jayar Jackson thinks the Santorum is unfairly being criticized for what, in context, seems to have been a candidate tripping over a verbal tic (emphases mine):

Determined to vet up-and-coming GOP candidate Rick Santorum, CNN's Gary Tuchmann chose Wednesday to pull a number of liberal attacks on the candidate's social beliefs and call it a report. Apparently for CNN, "scrutiny" entails digging up liberal talking points instead of studying a candidate's voting record and economic and foreign policy plans.

Tuchman attested on Anderson Cooper 360 that "we can already tell you quite a bit about his vision for this country," adding that Santorum "has established a reputation as a conservative in every sense of the word." He then descended into implying that Santorum was a racist and a homophobe. [Video below the break.]

Is House Speaker John Boehner an anti-Obama racist? Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal all but accuses him in his Tuesday blog from Des Moines, “Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There.” (The web headline is blunter: “Republican Attacks Have Racist Undertones.”)

Actually, Rosenthal is all too happy to talk about racist Republicans if it helps Democrats politically, as he did on November 1, in one of his first blog posts: “...it was the Republicans who perfected the art of injecting racial fears into modern-day politics (remember Willie Horton in 1988?) and have conducted an unrelenting personal attack on President Obama that sometimes has not-so-subtle racial overtones.”

At the same time that the nation's leading networks can't call Obama a "liberal" more than about once a year, NPR's religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty on Monday announced Rick Santorum was "very, very conservative" on the social issues, in addition to being "very pro-life." He even -- horrors! -- home-schools his seven children.

"He's Catholic. He's billed himself very much as the family values candidate," the reporter announced on NPR's afternoon show Talk of The Nation. "His wife Karen has homeschooled all seven of their children. He's surging in the polls because he's been very, very conservative on these issues." They also discussed if white conservative Christians dislike Obama because they're racists.

On Tuesday's The Daily Show on Comedy Central, as he recounted the racist newsletters that were published in the 1990s under the name of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, host Jon Stewart mocked other GOP candidates after clips of them attacking Paul for not taking seriously the threat of a nuclear Iran, suggesting that the candidates were not so concerned about racism. (Video below)

Moments later, as he mocked Republican voters for adding former Senator Rick Santorum to the list of candidates they are willing to consider, Stewart took another race-based shot at the Republican Party as he used a box of Whitman's chocolates as a prop and pronounced the brand name as if it were "White Man's."

After showing clips of the candidates criticizing Paul's willingness to allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, Stewart cracked:

During MSNBC coverage of the Republican Party Iowa caucuses on Tuesday, shortly after 8:30 p.m, MSNBC's Chris Matthews lumped "neocons" and the socially conservative Moral Majority movement in with segregationist Dixiecrats as he asserted that Republicans had picked up the "droppings" and the "effluent" of the Democratic Party, causing the Republican Party to be too "junk laden" to open their minds to Ron Paul's far-left anti-war views. (Video below)

Twenty-four years ago, Los Angeles Dodgers VP Al Campanis was forced to resign his position for saying on national TV that blacks lack "the necessities" to be baseball managers and executives.  

On today's Hardball, Chris Matthews was so enjoying himself mocking Rick Perry's intelligence, that he decided to use a slightly mangled version of the same line on the Texas governor. Video after the jump.

Q. How do you know when MSNBC has sunk to unimaginable depths of Dem-partisan hackery? A. When even Al Sharpton renounces it.  

On his MSNBC show this evening, Sharpton said the network was right to apologize for the smear MSNBC host Thomas Roberts perpetrated against Mitt Romney earlier in the day, when Roberts suggested Romney had borrowed a campaign slogan from the Ku Klux Klan. Video after the jump.

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Joy Behar Show on HLN, after complaining about Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's proposal to provide school children with work experience and the chance to earn money in their schools, Whoopi Goldberg joined host Behar in asserting that it was "racist" for Gingrich to speak of preventing children from becoming "pimps and prostitutes and drug dealers."

Goldberg began by ranting about the absence of people who "want to see the country do better." Goldberg:

If you thought you'd heard the last of Jimmy Fallon's band and the case of the offensive song played on NBC's Late Night last week as Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann walked onto the stage, think again.

On Thursday, the bandleader responsible for the song choice was interviewed by Pitchfork, and he not surprisingly made some accusations of racism at "Tea Party extremists" (serious vulgarity warning):

Kevin Boyle reviewed two new books on the Ku Klux Klan for the Sunday Times Book Review under the heading “The Not-So-Invisible Empire.” Boyle, an Ohio State University history professor and frequent contributor to the Times Book Review, compared the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan. Boyle's review started and ended offensively:

Picking up on a blog post by a far-left group devoted to silencing Rush Limbaugh, ABC’s World News on Monday night dedicated an entire story to one word used by the conservative radio host, a comment the other networks failed to find newsworthy. “Loaded words,” fill-in anchor Georgre Stephanopoulos ominously teased, “the First Lady booed at a NASCAR event. Now Rush Limbaugh weighs in, hurling a racially-charged word at Michelle Obama.”

Soon, a “word” became “words” when Stephanopoulos later plugged the upcoming hit: “Still ahead on World News, Michelle Obama booed at a NASCAR event and now Rush Limbaugh hurls racially-charged words at the First Lady.” (updated with video below)

As NewsBusters previously reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Saturday expressed his harshest criticism of Barack Obama to date saying amongst other things that he's got "the worst kind of a notion of the presidency."

Roughly three months ago, Matthews on the syndicated weekend program bearing his name smelled racism in the declining number of whites supporting the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Updated [13:06 ET]: More analysis and full transcript added.

On Monday's Rock Center on NBC, correspondent Kate Snow savaged Alabama's new immigration law, touting left-wing historian Wayne Flynt comparing it to the racism of the 1960s: "This is just mean-spirited. This is – this is finding the most vulnerable people within a society....it's like the blacks in 1963 who could not vote in Alabama." [Audio available here]

Snow followed by citing the plight of one illegal immigrant family operating a bakery in the state: "The Sanchezs agree. They feel like Alabama blacks of the Jim Crow era." Snow then turned to Republican Governor Robert Bentley and leveled a harsh accusation: "The woman who owns this bakery, she said the men who did this are racists. She was talking about you, sir."

As Snow made the "Jim Crow era" comparison, footage appeared on screen of blacks being sprayed with fire hoses and threatened with attack dogs during civil rights marches in the '60s. [View video after the jump]

[UPDATED: See video and transcript below.] Appearing on ABC's Good Morning America, Monday, to shill for his latest book, Bill Maher told George Stephanopoulos he's rooting for Mitt Romney to win the Republican nomination. "At least he eats with a knife and fork. I mean, he is all that stands between us and the rise of the apes."

Couldn't that be seen as a bit racist toward Herman Cain? We're used to Maher slamming religious folks in that way, but "apes"? Stephanopoulos didn't blink. He only said "He's [Romney's] probably odds-on, although Newt Gingrich..." [MP3 audio here.]

Liberal MSNBC contributors like Toure have "gone beyond the pale" with their recent remarks about Herman Cain, NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center president Brent Bozell complained on the November 10 edition of "Hannity."

Bozell was reacting to a montage that included the liberal author anticipating a racist backlash by white conservatives who, according to Toure, will now fear Cain's "predatory black sexuality" following the allegations of Sharon Bialek, a "blonde, white woman."

"It's the worst kind of racism, Sean," Bozell added. "What they're trying to say is, 'Hey, look at you Republicans, this is a black boy. He's going after your white women. Look at this, aren't you offended, aren't you offended?!'" [see video below page break]

“There are several battles that are playing out across this country” today, MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts noted as he opened the 11 a.m. Eastern hour of live coverage on what the network is calling this year's "Super Tuesday."

Roberts quickly established that he and his network were in the trenches with liberals on every one of those "battles":

CNN's Howard Kurtz considers himself to be a media analyst, yet on Sunday's Reliable Sources, he spent 22 minutes discussing Politico's hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain without once mentioning how the press handled Bill Clinton's actual  sex scandals.

The program began:

Since Monday, MSNBC has practically been a 24 hour video loop of sexual harassment related attacks on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

On Friday's Martin Bashir show, guest Goldie Taylor actually said, "If Herman Cain did what he purportedly did, you know, back in the ’90s with these particular young women in the ’50s and ’60s in this country, he really would have been lynched" (video follows with transcript and commentary):