The Today show’s very belated attack on Rush Limbaugh on Monday, complete with Hillary’s minions comparing the hilarious Al Sharpton parody to a "minstrel show" (complete with blackface film clip), reminds me: how did NBC cover the last blackface controversy? That would be leftist blogger Jane Hamsher Photo-shopping Joe Lieberman in blackface on The Huffington Post last August 2 as she claimed he was an "integral part of the GOP’s bully machine for the last six years."
NBC didn’t. A Nexis search for terms like "minstrel show" and "blackface" found no mention of the blogger who stepped over the line. On the August 6 edition of Meet the Press, in a segment featuring Lanny Davis for Lieberman and Jim (brother of Howard) Dean for Ned Lamont, host Tim Russert ended with a very weak tip to the bloggers in that race:
RUSSERT: Lanny, you--Davis--your new book, "Scandal: How ‘Gotcha’ Politics Is Destroying America." You're very tough on the bloggers here. Is Joe Lieberman in trouble because of the bloggers or because of his support of--on the war for President Bush?
DAVIS: He's in a tight race because he's on the opposite side of the way most core Democrats--I don't blame it on the bloggers. But I do say that the virulence and the hatred where you can't disagree with somebody, you just have to call them evil, is really what I'm addressing in that book, and which this campaign unfortunately has had too much of.
The controversy wasn't totally ignored by liberal media outlets. The Internet reporters at CNN's The Situation Room noticed it twice -- Abby Tatton on August 3, and Jacki Schechner on August 7.
