During his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. declared that he wanted people to “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Almost 50 years later, that dream is still a long way off, judging from the clash on Saturday in which CNN Newsroom's black host Don Lemon told conservative white guest Ben Ferguson that because he doesn't “live as a black man,” he can't understand what people of that race are experiencing. Doesn't that also mean that non-conservatives cannot fully understand and be fair to conservatives? Read on for more.
Martin Luther King Jr.
CNN's Don Lemon Thinks Non-Blacks Cannot Fairly Report on Blacks So Why Can All-Liberal Media Report on Conservatives?
By Randy Hall | July 23, 2013 | 9:19 AM EDT 
By Noel Sheppard | January 23, 2013 | 11:44 AM EST
While the rest of the media were gushing and fawning over the idea that Barack Obama was going to be sworn in on Martin Luther King Jr's bible during his second inauguration Monday, a surprising voice spoke about the hypocrisy involved.
On Tuesday, PBS's Tavis Smiley aired a discussion on poverty originally broadcast on C-SPAN Thursday wherein black philosopher and activist Cornel West spoke at length about why he "got upset" when he heard Obama was going to do this (video follows with transcript and commentary, photo courtesy UPI):
By Kristine Marsh | January 21, 2013 | 12:19 PM EST
According to Peter Drier on the far-left website Alternet, Martin Luther King, Jr., “was a radical. He believed that America needed a ‘radical redistribution of economic and political power’. He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He was a strong ally of the nation's labor union movement. He opposed U.S. militarism and imperialism, especially the country's misadventure in Vietnam.”
Wow. So King was the perfect man of the left? Er, well, except for one thing: “Like most Americans in his day, King was homophobic, even though one of his closest advisors, Bayard Rustin, was gay.”
By Brad Wilmouth | March 6, 2012 | 11:42 PM EST
During live coverage of Super Tuesday, MSNBC's Chris Matthews harkened back to a famous historical phone call from then-Senator John F. Kennedy to Coretta King, after her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested, as he suggested that President Barack Obama's recent phone call to Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke would be similarly remembered as important to this year's presidential campaign.
Matthews asserted:
By Tom Blumer | November 6, 2011 | 1:17 AM EDT
According to an unbylined Associated Press report out of Atlanta tonight, when police move in to arrest members of a crowd which won't move when ordered to move, they "swarm." Nice insect comparison, eh? And in case readers didn't get the negative connotation the first time, the AP report used the word again in its final paragraph.
Here are several paragraphs from the report, including an unchallenged reference to Martin Luther King's "Poor People's Campaign" by the "Rev." Jesse Jackson (bolds are mine):
By Noel Sheppard | October 17, 2011 | 5:49 PM EDT
Martin Bashir's campaign to prove Herman Cain really isn't a black man continued Monday when he accused the Republican presidential candidate of skipping the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Monument in Washington, D.C., Saturday because he "really doesn't want to be overtly associated with African-Americans" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Noel Sheppard | October 8, 2011 | 2:18 PM EDT
As Al Sharpton ridiculed Herman Cain on MSNBC's "The Last Word" Friday for saying blacks have been brainwashed into voting for Democrats, the reverend ended up proving the Republican presidential candidate's point.
Seconds after claiming, "What [Cain] does not have the right is to rewrite history by saying that blacks were brainwashed by becoming Democrats," Sharpton showed his ignorance of the subject by stating, "We went with a Party that stood up for the Civil Rights Act of '64 and Voting Rights Act of '65" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Jack Coleman | August 30, 2011 | 12:05 PM EDT
No politician wants to be "Katrina-ed," observed NBC reporter Jamie Gangel on this past Sunday's "Meet the Press." Such reluctance doesn't extend to politics as practiced by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Sharpton told listeners of his radio show on Friday how he was chagrined that city officials in Washington, D.C., pulled the permits for a "March on Washington" to coincide with the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. (audio after page break)
By Noel Sheppard | August 28, 2011 | 3:11 PM EDT
At a ceremony to honor the opening of the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in our nation's capital Friday, the late civil rights leader's daughter Bernice made an historical error that would evoke tremendous ridicule and derision if she were a conservative.
"Lincoln remembered for signing the Declaration of Independence" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Ken Shepherd | June 10, 2011 | 11:04 PM EDT
How tone-deaf do you have to be to a) compare Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) to Martin Luther King, Jr. b) say the women who got Weiner's lewd photos were "hardly traumatized" and c) call on Weiner's wife Huma Abedin to call a press conference to belittle the media for attacking her hubby?
You might want to ask Daily Beast contributor Lee Siegel, who did just that (emphases mine) in a June 10 post entitled "C'Mon, America, Nobody's Perfect":
By Noel Sheppard | October 4, 2010 | 10:49 PM EDT 
Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel made some truly disgusting remarks on MSNBC Monday.
Chatting with Ed Schultz about Saturday's "One Nation" rally, vanden Heuvel first offered a despicable racial comparison between the makeup of that crowd and the one at the "Restoring Honor" rally in August.
Next, the unapologetic liberal said Glenn Beck and Fox News "shamed Martin Luther King's great speech by appropriating that terrain" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Brad Wilmouth | August 31, 2010 | 11:20 AM EDT
Appearing as a guest on Friday’s Countdown show on MSNBC, during a discussion of conservative talker Glenn Beck’s "Restoring Honor" rally, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson dismissed Dr. Alveda King – niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and former Georgia state representative – as a "figurehead or puppet" of Beck because of her scheduled participation in the rally.
And, even though she and her father took part in the Civil Rights Movement and even endured having her home bombed in the 1960s, Robinson went on to suggest that she really is not one of the "keepers of [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s] legacy" because she is supposedly "estranged from the rest of the King family."
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Friday, August 27, Countdown show on MSNBC: