Racism

The latest and possibly last (we can hope) preelection poll from partnership between the Associated Press and GfK Roper International purportedly tells us that most of us "now express prejudice toward blacks" whether we "recognize those feelings or not."

That's the conclusion communicated by AP reporter Sonya Ross and wire service deputy director of polling Jennifer Agiesta. In case we don't get the point, the item's accompanying photograph at the AP national site, Yahoo News and likely elsewhere is of Barack Obama, who despite the recognized and unrecognized racism of most Americans managed to carry 53% of the vote in 2008. Contrary to the report's headline, the AP pair admit that the AP-GfK poll results alone (done online, to add insult to injury) don't prove the point they're trying to make; other bizarre tests are also involved.

New York Times reporter and sympathetic Obama biographer Jodi Kantor implied that various insults suffered by President Obama were in fact racist attacks in her Sunday front page profile, "For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics – An Embrace of Black Life Balanced by a Belief in Universal Principles." Plus: After months of being a Hispanic, accused shooter George Zimmerman is again a "white man" at the Times.

The liberal media's mission to smear the Koch brothers and Americans For Prosperity, one of the advocacy groups they support, continues.

On Wednesday, the Huffington Post published an article with the inflammatory headline "Americans For Prosperity Distributes Ads Promoting Pro-Slavery Arkansas Legislators":

There are plenty of reasonable explanations for why Republicans have a hard time winning over black voters. Leave it to a Kossack to offer an unreasonable explanation: that today's GOP "looks and acts like a white supremacist lynch mob." That blogger also likens Ann Coulter to a rabid weasel and presents her as one of the leading apologists for this violently racist party.

As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym.

Liberal racism sightings have become like a lunatic's version of "Where's Waldo?" Kevin Baker of Harper's magazine says Romney's referring to his "five boys" in last week's debate was how he "slyly found a way" to call Obama a "boy." Says Baker: "How the right's hard-core racists must have howled at that!"

MSNBC's Chris Matthews says the word "apartment" is racist because black people live in apartments. He also says the word "Chicago" is racist because -- despite its well-known reputation as the home of Al Capone and the Daley machine -- a lot of black people live there, too. (And don't get him started on "Chicago apartments"!)

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch sent a Twitter message on Sunday morning complaining about the Sunday New York Times: "Practically nothing in NYT, predicable nearly unreadable Review section - even unintelligible Maureen Dowd."

Admittedly, the lead Sunday Review article by novelist Kevin Baker was more enticing to liberals, who seem to be section editor Andrew Rosenthal's intended audience: "Republicans To Cities: Drop Dead." (The headline and graphic are meant to mimic the infamous New York Daily News headline from October 30, 1975, after President Gerald Ford denied federal assistance to the city: "Ford to City: Drop Dead.") Baker talked of "radio ranters" of the right wing, bizarrely suggested D.C. was a victim of "lax gun laws," and accused Republicans of racist "dog whistles."

Okay, Steven Spielberg said what he said about Democrats and Republicans at his prerelease press conference promoting "Lincoln," his next movie which will be released just after Election Day. And of course he's spectacularly wrong in claiming that the country's two major political parties have "traded political places over the last 150 years."

If that were the entire story and Reuters reporter Christine Kearney (pictured here at LinkedIn) had simply relayed what Spielberg said, this post wouldn't be about media bias. But is, because Ms. Kearney herself took a journey into the land of make-believe with this subsequent sentence:

As NewsBusters reported Monday, African-American actress Stacey Dash was thoroughly lambasted on Twitter for expressing her support for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

During an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan Tuesday, a defiant Dash marvelously said, "I chose him not by the color of his skin but the content of his character" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Can you imagine the outrage if a white commentator wrote an article with the headline "The 15 Most Overrated Black People?"

On Monday, African American Studies professor and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill published a piece at the Huffington Post entitled "The 15 Most Overrated White People."

In his speech to the Republican National Convention earlier this year, actor Clint Eastwood told the assembled crowd that there are more conservatives and moderates in Hollywood than they might think. Such people “play closer to the vest. They do not go around hot dogging it,” Eastwood said.

Unfortunately, actress Stacey Dash is finding out the hard way what happens to those celebrities who are willing to think for themselves: they get attacked by the very people who claim to preach “tolerance” and “peace.” (Note: This blog post is “not safe for work” and certainly not for children.)

The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan clearly hasn't gotten over last week's horrible debate performance by the President of the United States.

In an article entitled "Behind The Obama Implosion," Sullivan wrote Sunday evening, "If Obama was rattled by Drudge, Carlson and Hannity yelling 'Remember he's a n---er!' the days before, then the Romney campaign has gotten into Obama's usually impermeable head."

MSNBC's Touré made another in a series of racist remarks Friday.

Appearing on the Martin Bashir show, Touré said of Republicans, "If you just have a bunch of white people, you’re gonna come up with alternate realities that don’t make any sense" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MRC President and NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell appeared on the October 4 edition of Hannity and exposed the hollowness of the media's argument against covering inflammatory quotes Barack Obama made in a 2007 speech on race, clips aired for the first time earlier this week on Hannity. [Watch the full video after the jump.]

Host Sean Hannity set up the newest "Media Mash" segment: "I just played this tape, 2007. Yeah, the speech was reported on, but they didn't report what happened in this speech. They didn't -- major portions of it where the President is accusing the United States government -- before a predominantly African-American audience -- of not taking care of Katrina victims because of race."

If one were trying to prove in court that MSNBC is crazily biased, you could do worse than submitting Rachel Maddow's Tuesday night show.

She was discussing the recently released June 2007 tape of Barack Obama using Hillary Clinton's black accent to tell an audience of black preachers that the U.S. government doesn't care about black people, Maddow explained with her typical leaden sarcastic wit that the tape reveals Obama's "secret plan to be way more black than he seems to you now."

CNN dismissed the controversy behind a 2007 Obama video that just resurfaced, by calling it "old news" and whitewashing the President's own words. CNN even touted its own 2007 coverage of the speech without admitting that it ignored the most controversial part.

Anchor Soledad O'Brien, who has stuck up for Obama more than once before, lamely spun that Obama "was talking about racial discontent and hopelessness because of poverty." CNN's Zoraida Sambolin said "it is old news" and added that CNN "covered it at the time." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Andrew Sullivan is spitting mad at Tucker Carlson.  Writing at The Daily Beast today, Sullivan vilifies the editor-in-chief of the Daily Caller as a "degenerate, disgusting, racist demagogue."

Sullivan is infuriated by Carlson's Daily Caller having recently called attention to a 2007 speech, largely ignored by the MSM, by then presidential candidate Barack Obama.  Addressing an audience of black ministers, Obama lavishly praised Rev. Jeremiah Wright, blamed the LA riots and the response to Hurricane Katrina on racism and made, in the words of the Daily Caller, "repeated and all-but-explicit appeals to racial solidarity, referring to 'our' people and 'our neighborhoods.'”  More after the jump.

Ann Coulter had a tremendously contentious encounter with civil rights activist and author Kevin Powell on Current TV’s Say Anything Tuesday.

Things got so heated that by the end of their discussion, he called her “homophobic, anti-Semite, and a racist," and she called him “a moron” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

As even the casual reader of NewsBusters is well aware, the MSNBC cable news network is forever on the lookout for racially-tinged "code words" in Republican speeches and "dog whistle" ads by GOP super PACs against Democrats. But the network's keen sense of outrage is conspicuously absent when it comes to attacks by Democratic groups against Mia Love, the African-American Republican Mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, who is challenging long-time liberal -- he boasts a lifetime American Conservative Union score of 38.61 out of a possible 100 -- Rep. Jim Matheson (D).

Michael Warren of the Weekly Standard reported on Sept. 28 about a Utah State Democratic Committee mailer than seems to have darkened Love's skin tone. Warren also linked to a Blue Dog Democrat-linked Super PAC ad that falsely charged that Love's record is summed up in the words "skyrocketing crime" [video embedded below page break].

From his spot on the Time Ideas blog, the MSNBC anchor Toure admitted "If President Obama had to run against Senator Obama of 2008, he’d probably be crushed. Back then, Obama seemed superhuman; today he is merely mortal. His victory in 2008 was historic, breaking the race barrier in the nation’s highest office."

Guess what came next. Re-electing Obama is a greater test of whether America is racist than it was in 2008: "But an Obama victory in 2012 would say something even more profound about how far our country has come. Granted, Obama’s election (or not) is merely one of many factors that will tell us where we are on race in America. But it is a big one." Toure put Obama into the metaphor of The Matrix:

NewsBusters has been showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala tomorrow evening. (Click here for posts recounting the worst of 1988 through 2011.)

Today, the worst bias of 2012 (so far): Newsweek sees Barack Obama as “grotesquely underappreciated,” afflicted by critics who are simply “dumb;” Chief Justice John Roberts becomes a media hero by voting to save ObamaCare; and an ex-CNN correspondent charges Republicans are trying to take the country back “to the good old days of Jim Crow.” [Quotes and video below the jump.]

CNN's Jim Acosta on Tuesday's Situation Room asked what many will think was a truly offensive question.

"If you were to somehow beat the first African-American president, what would you say to the black community to assure them that you would be their president also?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In the just published excerpt of Ann Coulter's new book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama, the conservative author noted the racial double standards of MSNBC commentators such as Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow.

Appearing on Fox News's Fox & Friends Tuesday, Coulter expanded her criticism to Lawrence O'Donnell and HBO's Bill Maher (video follows with transcript):

Ann Coulter is an eight-time New York Times bestselling author as well as the legal correspondent for Human Events and a syndicated columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.

She has been a dear friend of the Media Research Center’s for decades and is beloved by NewsBusters readers around the world.

We’re very pleased to have an opportunity to discuss her new book with her entitled, “Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.”

All this week during the 11 a.m. Eastern MSNBC Live program, "we're going to look at the ballot battles that could decide the race for the White House," MSNBC's Richard Lui noted today as he set up a segment with two liberal opponents of voter ID laws -- "wired into the concerns of minority voters" -- Ohio State Senator Nina Turner (D) and Common Cause staff counsel Stephen Spaulding.

Although Lui briefly quoted from two officials for True the Vote, a conservative anti-voter fraud group that supports voter ID laws, he failed to bring on any representatives of the group, even though Turner was there to rail against what she sees as the racist motives behind the Ohio Secretary of State's move to cut back on in-person voting hours.

Bill Maher not surprisingly spent most of his HBO show Friday trashing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

During his final New Rule, the Real Time host said, "In many ways we're all a bit Mitt Romney - and I don't just mean dorks in mom jeans who are afraid of black people" (video follows with transcript and commentary, serious vulgarity warning, file photo):

Civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) has said new voter ID laws reflect old Jim Crow laws, and CNN's Carol Costello played right into his outlandish rhetoric on Friday morning.

"Are you kind of stunned we're talking about these kinds of things in this day and age, with your history, I mean?" Costello asked the liberal congressman of the debate over voter ID laws. He answered in the affirmative and again likened voter ID laws to Jim Crow. [Video below the break. Audio here.]