Race Issues

Do you remember when the musician Prince changed his stage name to a symbol as a form of protest against his music label? Since no one could pronounce it, he was generally referred to as “the artist formerly known as Prince”  in the press.  The immigration debate took a similar absurd turn yesterday thanks to the Los Angeles Times which announced to the world that it would not only cease…

You think it's tough being a white man in America today? The next time you ponder that, consider a casting call advertisement placed on Craigslist Monday for a new kids show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation requesting interested actors be "Any race except Caucasian":

New York Times economics reporter Annie Lowrey's story on the front of Monday's Business section has a headline that just begs for the old joke ("World Ends: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit") on the Times's traditional knee-jerk liberalism: "Recession Worsened Wealth Gap For Races." Millions of Americans suffered a loss of wealth during the recession and the sluggish recovery that followed.…

They must be paying by the word over at Politico. It's difficult to come up with another explanation as to why reporter Jonathan Martin would slog through about 3,100 words on an item entitled "Black pols stymied in Obama era." He could have easily summarized why this is the case in eight words: "Because Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama." Oh, he could have added a few more, namely "and…

On Thursday for Friday's print edition, the New York Times carried a weakly headlined but well-written story entitled "U.S. Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination" on its front page. Written by Sharon LaFraniere with the help of three others, it laid out how what began in 1997 as a class-action suit by black farmers (Pigford v. Glickman) claiming they had suffered discrimination at the…

Salon's David Sirota, who on Tuesday wrote a column called "Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American" and doubled down on Wednesday with "I still hope the bomber is a white American" (respectively noted by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters here and here), has predictably continued his incoherent rants. In a subsequent column, he wrote about how the "Boston aftermath brings out…

Country music star Brad Paisley is either an idiot or a genius. If he wrote the song "Accidental Racist" to stir a whirlwind of (mostly bad) publicity, he's a genius. But the negative cultural consensus strongly suggests he should have never been dumb enough to try to write a racial-harmony song. Paisley performed the song as a dialogue with rapper LL Cool J, now a star on the CBS drama "…

There comes a point when one has to wonder if Bill Maher is willing to say anything, no matter how disgusting or controversial, to attract viewers to his HBO program. On Thursday, Maher published a piece wherein he stated, and I quote, "It turns out that Ben Carson is as stupid as every other conservative hero...Remember, this is the Great Black Hope of the GOP."

Music critic Jon Caramanica reviewed country star Brad Paisley's latest album "Wheelhouse," in "Taking Country Less Conservative" for the Arts section of Wednesday's New York Times. Caramanica gave Paisley backhanded compliments for "openmindedness" while insulting the genre of country music as rigidly conservative (Caramanica has previously given backhanded praised to country music itself, for…

As NewsBusters reported, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Monday actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others.” Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain responded to this nonsense on Fox News's Hannity Tuesday stating, "It's laughable what Chris Matthews is saying...Maybe he doesn't have enough black friends who's telling him the truth" (video…

Dr. Benjamin Carson made a comment on the Mark Levin radio show Monday guaranteed to invoke scorn from media members across the fruited plain. When Levin asked, "A lot of white liberals just don't like it, do they," Carson responded, "They’re the most racist people there are because, you know, they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come…

Civil rights attorney and talk radio host Leo Terrell got into quite a heated exchange with Sean Hannity Monday evening. During a segment about the double standard by which African-American conservatives and liberals are treated by the media, Terrell called Dr. Ben Carson Hannity's "puppet" telling his host, "You created a monster" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews seems to think that only white people can be racist. On Monday’s Hardball, he actually said, “Racism is the belief that one race - whites - should rule all others” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters readers know all too well, the folks at MSNBC spend a great deal of time calling everyone they don't agree with racists. Controversial talk radio host Alex Jones took this sentiment a step further Friday saying, "You turn on MSNBC, it’s like the Ku Klux Klan channel...Just race, everything race" (video follows with transcript and commentary):