On Thursday night, the Virginia gubernatorial race hit a potential turning point when, at a protest outside an Arlington County School Board meeting in which GOP candidate and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears spoke against children being subjected to sharing changing rooms with transgender individuals, an eldery, white, progressive woman holding a racist sign that read: “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t share your bathroom, then blacks can’t share my water fountain.”
Unsurprisingly, this received zero mention Friday on ABC, CBS, and NBC during their flagship morning network news shows. In addition, it never came up on CNN’s various AM programs as well as MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The silence was aided in part by only a paper statement denouncing the sign from the candidate this women ostensibly supports, Democrat Abigail Spanberger.
There were two short nods between the Fox News Channel’s flagship morning show Fox & Friends and its lead-in, Fox & Friends First.
On the latter, co-host Todd Piro declared: “And an absolutely disgusting, racist message targeting Virginia Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears at a school board meeting now being met with backlash on both sides of the aisle.”
As for the main show, Earle-Sears brought it up near the end of her interview with co-host Brian Kilmeade:
[A]nd then last night you saw that they equated bathroom opportunities with me being black in America and here I am, second in command of the former capital of the Confederacy — me, the immigrant whom they say, as Democrats, they love more than anybody. Me, a black woman who they say they love as Democrats more than anybody. This is insane.
Kilmeade replied it was “insane” and while Spanberger “did denounce the sign...I would love to see it more public” in “stand[ing] up and say[ing] that’s out of bounds.”
“A very weak response from a very weak person who we know cannot lead Virginia as governor. She’s finally come out of hiding when she should have a long time ago came out and defended so many things that are so wrong and she’s been absent,” Earle-Sears replied.
As our friend and former NewsBusters intern Greg Price quipped on X: “You just know she was blasting NPR when she made that sign thinking she cooked.
Instead, the networks had other priorities, such as ABC’s Good Morning America touting video an alligator swimming with sharks in South Carolina, CBS Mornings showing viral video of an out-of-control front-end loader rolling through traffic in Massachusetts, and NBC’s Today doing a deep dive on anti-aging supplements.
