In an incident ignored by the media, race-baiter extraordinaire Andrea Mitchell and other big-name journalists candidly exposed their bigotry and racial prejudices at a friendly forum in the nation's capital last year.
In an unusually candid conversation, mainstream media stars Mitchell, David Gregory, and Dana Milbank let loose in an orgy of Caucasian self-flagellation during a panel discussion titled, "Media: Race & Politics -- The Impact of Race in Politics 2012," at the National Action Network's conference in Washington, D.C. The left-wing street thug group is headed by none other than Jew-hating Obama ally Al Sharpton.
Now's a good time to bring this up as Mitchell, one of the biggest Obama supplicants on the boob tube, improbably received the National Press Club's highest honor, the Fourth Estate Award. Mitchell is receiving the prize even though it is designated for "a journalist who has made significant contributions to the field through a lifetime of excellence."
Mitchell is NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports."
The panel discussion, which took place April 13, 2012, ought to be old news, but it didn't make the news at all: no media outlets got around to reporting it at the time. Presumably they weren't interested because they agreed with the speakers and didn't consider their comments controversial. Of course, April 13 last year was two days after George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin. (Martin's mourning parents made an appearance at the conference.)
Mitchell and other panelists essentially laid out their race-baiting journalistic philosophy, giving away a chapter of the racial arsonist playbook. These activists believe in outcome-based journalism, twisting and inventing facts, lying, and distorting in order to inject race as an issue where it doesn't belong.
Mitchell praised Sharpton, her MSNBC co-worker, for inflaming racial tensions so much that otherwise reluctant authorities were forced to lay charges against Zimmerman. "I daresay that it's no accident that it was the Reverend Al and other people, African-Americans, who were the first to really focus on Trayvon Martin's case," she said to applause.
Violins should have been playing in the background as Mitchell recounted a chance encounter with a colleague newly hired from Florida. The young man "who is on-air in our local station," told Mitchell he was "hurting."
According to Mitchell, he explained that he comes from a law enforcement family and was often stopped when he lived in Florida because people thought he "didn't belong in that neighborhood." He added that eventually he had to secure a letter from his employer to prove he was a newsman because he "was stopped so frequently in white communities."
"This is a young man and the Trayvon case just reopened all of that" for him, said Mitchell. "As a white woman I can understand, I can read, but I haven't lived it," she said, urging that there be "more people of color in the newsrooms and reporting and editing and writing."
"We have a long way to go," she said self-righteously.
Mitchell said reporters should assume that criticism of Obama is animated by racial hostility.
"Let's talk about what the 'food stamp president' [characterization of Obama] really represented. Let's call out the people who talk about the birth certificate and say what really is the continuing, pervasive racism that is underneath the surface," she said to applause.
Mitchell argued that the U.S. media is racist because it ignores what always goes on day in and day out in the perpetually troubled Third World nation of Haiti.
"I think race plays a role in the subjects we don't cover in terms of foreign policy as well as domestic. Can you imagine that all these years after the earthquake that Haitians are still living in tents and that we are covering it -- if at all -- episodically only when Bill Clinton, a white former president, goes there or maybe not even covering that."
Mitchell fails to point out that there is a very good reason the mainstream media doesn't do a lot of stories about the plight of those who live in Haiti.
Haitians have been living in desperate, grinding poverty more or less continuously since Toussaint L'Ouverture, the "black Napoleon," led a revolutionary uprising that won Haiti independence from France in 1804.
It made sound harsh to say it, but routine suffering in Haiti isn't news in these United States. It's the status quo. News is, after all, supposed to be new. The fact that Mitchell feels bad about the lack of coverage shows she lacks intellectual toughness and is more advocate than legitimate journalist.
Mitchell whined that newsrooms were too white. "I don't see the kind of progress in diversity in the media at all levels, not only on camera but behind the camera that I think we should see," she said to applause.
"We have more people of color anchoring newscasts and being executive producers and having major roles but not nearly enough to reflect the importance of the contributions and the role that people of color play in our multiracial society. And I just think that there's an effort in some quarters, but not enough, and that race does matter in your perspective, in your filter, in your life experience."
Mitchell's phrase "race does matter" may as well have come from a Ku Klux Klan or a Black Panthers press release. But even if a lack of racial diversity is meaningful, one has to wonder why Mitchell has never made a remark like this about ideological diversity. Given that we exist in a multi-ideological society, one would think that Mitchell would consider all kinds of diversity of value if she truly valued it.
For a few years now it has been the cri de coeur of politically correct journalists who put politics ahead of truth-seeking that race is all-important. They demand apartheid-like rules, racial profiling in the form of affirmative action, and racial quotas everywhere.
Gathering news is supposed to be about finding out what is happening, and in some cases, why, showing the world as it is, not as it ought to be. Any journalist who says otherwise should find a new line of work.
While Mitchell's comments may not shock anyone who has been following the leftist poster child's career, rarely does she state things as baldly as she did in Al Sharpton's oily embrace.
David Gregory, the wildly overrated moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," joined in on the America-bashing.
Although less in-your-face than Mitchell, he perpetuated the tedious leftist myth that opposition to Obama is based largely on his race.
"When we talk about de-legitimizing political leaders, we've seen it with Bill Clinton. We saw it with George Bush. We now see it with Barack Obama. What role does race play there? So let's not get into the business in the media of saying, 'well, all is settled, let's not make it an issue.' There are times to emphasize race to say, 'where does it exacerbate a problem?'"
Washington Post pontificator Milbank, a perennial font of dreary, conventional liberal wisdom, used the opportunity to smear former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).
The race issue "explodes in episodic ways, whether it's over the immigration debate and electrified fences or the Trayvon [Martin] case or Newt's race-baiting on the campaign trail," he said. Milbank didn't bother to explain what examples of "race-baiting" he thought Gingrich guilty of, probably because they don't exist.
The most ugly comments spewed from the mouth of George E. Curry, former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine.
His angry soliloquy was littered with falsehoods and cheap shots.
"Look. Whether we're looking at O.J. Simpson, Barry Bonds, or Trayvon Martin there is a racial divide in this country and it has been that way for years. Even in a case that shouldn't be racial -- [the 2005 Hurricane] Katrina -- if you said had that been a dominant white city would you get a different federal response, you see whites and blacks have totally, totally, different views on that. And so that is there and it's also reflected in the media."
"People don't stop being white just because they go into journalism," Curry said to loud applause.
"The problem is that, you know, it's alright to call President Obama a food stamp president when actually it was George Bush who had more people on food stamps in this country. It's alright to portray him as a chimpanzee or an ape," he said indignantly in a reference to depictions of President Obama.
Curry didn't mention that cartoonist Thomas Nast famously portrayed Abraham Lincoln as an ape-like creature. Ditto for George W. Bush who was routinely portrayed on editorial pages as simian. And as every zoologist knows, a chimpanzee is a kind of ape, so Curry's comment is redundant.
"Race is a problem," Curry said.
"It continues to be a problem in our society and in media and it's going to get worse in the media because we've never had fair representation in the media," he said to still more applause from the quota-loving crowd.
This piece originally appeared at the American Thinker.
