Julian Bond

All this week MSNBC is giving Politics Nation host Al Sharpton a platform to attack voter ID laws as a move to "Block the Vote" and keep black voters from the polls.

To help drive more viewers to tune in, the network is having daytime news anchors run segments critical of such voter ID laws. Today during the 11 a.m. Eastern hour of MSNBC programming, anchor Thomas Roberts interviewed former NAACP chairman Julian Bond, who insisted that voter ID laws were "racist in intent" [MP3 audio here; video available here]:

One of the greatest perversions of statism is the use of taxpayer money to push for ever more government spending and more government intervention. A casual listener to the far-left end of the FM dial, National Public Radio, will quickly conclude that NPR is one of America's leading offenders in this perversion.

Let's just take one show, the August 22 evening newscast "All Things Considered," perhaps one of the most ill-named programs in the history of radio. Conservatism is never considered. It is only besmirched, assaulted, and rhetorically dismembered.

On Thursday's Early Show on CBS, their interview with radical black leftist Michael Eric Dyson was preceded by a Jan Crawford news story stuffed with Team Obama apologies to Shirley Sherrod for their quick and dirty firing via BlackBerry. The only non-adminstration (or non-apologizing) soundbite in the story was radical black leader Julian Bond: 

CRAWFORD: But the controversy seems to show that on one of the nation's most complex social issues, race, the Obama administration reacted impulsively.

JULIAN BOND [FORMER CHAIRMAN, NAACP]: We need to get this out in public discussion. We can't hide from it. And I'm afraid the Obama administration more often hides from it than confronts it.  

CBS and the other networks utterly excuse the hateful and vicious comments Bond makes against conservatives, constantly accusing them of being racists, like this doozy from January 20 of this year, a few weeks before he stepped down after two decades as the NAACP's chairman of the board:

Marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP on CBS’s Sunday Morning, correspondent Bill Whitaker wondered: "A black president who addresses black issues unflinchingly...Attorney General Eric Holder dedicated to equal justice...some say begs the question, is the NAACP needed anymore? Is it even relevant? Is it time for the venerable organization to say ‘mission accomplished’?"

Later in the segment, Whitaker answered that question: "[Current NAACP President Benjamin Todd] Jealous and [former NAACP President Julian] Bond say with one of fifteen black males behind bars, with black students in inferior schools, with almost half of black homeowners in subprime mortgages...there’s plenty of work to do."

On NBC’s Nightly News on Wednesday, correspondent Ron Allen similarly questioned the NAACP’s relevance: "With an African-American in the White House and many discrimination battles won, the question is whether the NAACP is still necessary." Allen, like Whitaker, cited the organization’s leadership: "Jealous says the battle now is to close the social and economic achievement gap between people of color and mainstream America...A fight for justice and equality he insists must be carried on."

Neither Whitaker nor Allen applied a liberal political to the NAACP or featured any critics of the organization’s left-wing causes.

The Washington Post’s front-page Obama story on Friday includes a glaring error. Reporters Krissah Thompson and Cheryl Thompson began with a reference to Barack Obama’s first speech before the "nation’s oldest civil rights organization."

This is a standard claim in stories on the NAACP, but it’s untrue – the NAACP just turned 100, but the National Rifle Association was founded in 1871. This is only true if "civil rights group" can only be used as an honorific synonym for "black interest group." If the election of Obama ends one era of the "civil rights" struggle, can reporters stop using the "civil rights" tag just for black groups?

The Friday story by Thompson and Thompson never defined the NAACP as a liberal group or part of the Democratic base, even as the NAACP lobbies for Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation. This is also typical. In a 1994 study of 2,707 NAACP news stories in national newspapers, we found eight liberal labels, or in 0.3 percent of stories.