Race Issues

Leave it to MSNBC to twist the rhetoric of the Tea Party following Thad Cochran’s upset of Chris McDaniel in the June 24 Mississippi runoff. On Tuesday's Now, host Alex Wagner and David Corn of Mother Jones both strongly suggested that racism is the reason why the Tea Party objected to thousands of Democrats pushing Cochran to victory. Wagner sneered, “This is particularly pointed for the…

Bob Costas, liberal sportscaster for NBC, had some harsh words for his own network’s handling of the Donald Sterling controversy earlier this year.  Costas appeared on MSNBC’s Up w/ Steve Kornacki on Saturday, July 5 and mocked the idea that there was widespread debate over the appropriateness of Sterling’s racist comments. The NBC sports anchor argued that “when people say, well, this is an…

A prominent exhibit explaining why the nation's trust in its media establishment has dropped to precipitous lows would likely include Tom Cohen's Thursday afternoon column at CNN expressing befuddlement over President Barack Obama's unpopularity. After all, Cohen's headline crows that under Obama we have "more jobs" and "less war" (!), so there's a "disconnect" which must be explained. To…

Hobby Lobby's objection on religious grounds to paying for abortion-causing contraceptives for its employees reminds Eugene Robinson of segregationists who cited the Bible in support of their views.  In his great magnimity, Robinson allowed that the Hobby Lobby case "is perhaps a bit different." But if the WaPo columnist didn't think the segregation analogy were relevant, he presumably wouldn't…

On the June 25 edition of Hardball, fill-in host Steve Kornacki and his guests discussed the implications of Thad Cochran’s surprising upset of Chris McDaniel in the Mississippi GOP Senate runoff. The panel mocked the Tea Party’s outrage at Thad Cochran over his courting of Democratic voters in the primary. Kornacki laughed off Chris McDaniel’s assertion that the outcome was unbecoming of…

Reacting to Thad Cochran’s surprising victory over Chris McDaniel in the GOP Senate runoff last night, a panel on the June 25 edition of The Reid Report tried to comprehend why Southern states have passed voter ID laws. Host Joy Reid insinuated that there were racial overtones to these laws, believing that Republicans were attempting to “limit minority voter influence,” particularly following…

Shortly after news broke on Wednesday that Diane Sawyer would step down as anchor of ABC's World News and be replaced by David Muir, Temple University journalism professor Karen Turner ranted to MediaBistro's TVNewser blog: "In this growing multicultural nation, it's unconscionable that as of September three white men will lead their respective networks."

On the June 24 edition of Hardball With Chris Matthews, the MSNBC anchor invited Adam Brandon of the Tea Party organization FreedomWorks onto the show in an attempt to portray the Tea Party as targeting black voters in the Republican Mississippi primary run-off. Matthews claimed McDaniel’s supporters were citing a “Jim Crow-era law from 1942" to try to stifle votes by African-American voters…

Joy Reid has never been afraid of stating her true opinion of the Republican Party. On the June 23 edition of her eponymous program The Reid Report, the MSNBC host invited colleague Chris Hayes of All In With Chris Hayes to talk about his newest segment, “Behind The Color Line,” which investigated de facto segregation in American schools. When Hayes told Reid that this segregation was…

Hillary Clinton sat down with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour for a town hall interview on Tuesday, June 17  to promote her new book “Hard Choices” and was greeted with questions that tilted five to one in favor of liberal issues. The interview focused on a variety of domestic and foreign topics but it was Amanpour’s question to Clinton about racism towards President Obama that caught a lot of…

In a scathing column for The New Republic, Alec MacGillis charged–with scarce evidence–that Governor Scott Walker’s (R-Wis.) political success is the result of racial politics in the state of Wisconsin. MacGillis’s headline is predictable left-wing race baiting: “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker”. MacGillis suggested that the Badger State governor’s political rise is the product of…

In a video segment (HT Twitchy) entitled "How Low Can You Go?" on MSNBC's "Last Word," which the network's web site corrected as this post was being drafted, substitute host Ari Melber, filling in for Lawrence O'Donnell, is seen bemoaning the resignation of a Democratic legislator in Virginia. An accompanying visual originally showed a map of North Carolina. Apparent the answer to the map's…

The liberals at National Public Radio can’t really imagine guns being necessary for anything...unless perhaps it’s to keep Southern segregationists at bay. On Thursday afternoon’s Tell Me More talk show, host Michel Martin brought on Charles Cobb, who wrote the book This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made The Civil Rights Movement Possible. She called it a “hiding in plain…

This past weekend at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, attendees who voted in a straw poll gave almost 60 percent of their straws to Hispanic-American Ted Cruz (30.3 percent), who edged out African-American Ben Carson (29.4 percent), leaving all others, only one of whom broke 10 percent, in the dust. In what should be considered embarrassing timing, LA Weekly Magazine is…