In March 2012, NewsBusters reported NBC’s Today show deceptively edited George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it appear he was a racist.
On Sunday, HBO actually had one of its primary characters on the series The Newsroom deceptively edit that call exactly the way NBC News did it (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
As NewsBusters has been reporting, CNN's Don Lemon has been taking a lot of heat from black media members as a result of his opinions concerning race relations in America.
On Saturday, in a very lengthy segment on CNN Newsroom, Lemon once again addressed his detractors doing so in a fashion that folks on both sides of this debate should be extremely proud of (video follows with commentary and full transcript at end of post):
On Monday's The Last Word on MSNBC, host Lawrence O'Donnell claimed to present "proof" that FNC's Bill O'Reilly was wrong in his July 22 commentary on race to warn about the negative effects of out-of-wedlock births on the black population.
The MSNBC host also managed to take O'Reilly out of context as O'Donnell suggested that the O'Reilly's were not relevant to Trayvon Martin because he was the product of a two-parent family, the FNC host, in reality, was arguing that out-of-wedlock birth leads to high crime rates among the black population, which leads to people having elevated fear of young black men.
And, while O'Donnell claimed that O'Reilly "defended" the shooting of Trayvon Martin, O'Reilly actually asserted that "it was wrong for Zimmerman to confront Martin based on his appearance," which hardly amounts to a total defense of Zimmerman's actions.
O'Donnell teased the segment by predicting that O'Reilly would be "embarrassed." O'Donnell:
Oprah Winfrey on Monday said the killings of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till are the "same thing."
This transpired during an interview with The Grio that aired on NBC's Today show (video follows with transcript and commentary):
On Wednesday's PoliticsNation, MSNBC host Al Sharpton not only accused FNC's Bill O'Reilly and other right-leaning hosts of "distorting" the actions of Democrats on the issue of racial "grievance," but the MSNBC host for the third time in the past couple of weeks recounted and distorted comments O'Reilly made in September 2007 about his trip to a predominantly black restaurant in Harlem.
MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor compared O'Reilly to 1960s segregationist Lester Maddox, a Democratic governor of Georgia known for trying to undermine the Civil Rights Movement.
Sharpton recounted that President Obama and other Democrats are trying to have a "serious conversation about race," playing several clips, and then turned to complaining about reaction from O'Reilly and other right-leaning figures:
"A Hoodie. A Symbol. A Museum Piece? What will become of Trayvon Martin's sweatshirt, the latest piece of trial evidence to capture the public's fascination?" That's how the editors of the Washington Post-owned free tabloid Express grabbed the eyeballs of Washington Metrorail riders this morning.
Manuel Roig-Franzia's cover story on page 12 -- "Iconic Evidence Has Unclear Fate: Supporters view Trayvon Martin's hoodie as more than a trial artifact" -- seems to be spun off from a July 31 Post Style section front-pager, "Where's the Evidence," which looked more broadly at "iconic exhibits" of evidence in high-profile trials such as the infamous glove in the O.J. Simpson murder trial or the Bushmaster rifle used by D.C. snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. But the closing paragraphs of Roig-Franzia's Express piece chiefly served as a vehicle for MSNBC host the Rev. Al Sharpton to promote his designs on Trayvon's hoodie, not to mention Sharpton's insistence that Martin is the Emmett Till of the millennial generation (emphasis mine):
Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly began his Monday evening edition of The O'Reilly Factor by pointing out what anchors on two of his cable network rivals said about his statement that people in “the grievance industry” don't discuss complicated racial problems.
O'Reilly then went on to contrast the actions of Don Lemon -- an anchor on CNN-- who the Fox News host called “honest” and courageous for daring to state that the FNC host was not some sort of racist for daring to state that a number of young black men have destructive habits that are encouraged by entertainment media.
On the Monday, July 29, All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes had to make a retraction for incorrectly citing statistics on Friday suggesting that a higher percentage of black murder victims are murdered by whites than the percentage of white murder victims killed by blacks.
Hayes had used the incorrect numbers as he mocked FNC's Bill O'Reilly for his recent commentary which dealt in part with black-on-black crime. On Friday's show, the MSNBC host had erroneously declared:
As NewsBusters has been reporting, CNN’s Don Lemon has taken a lot of heat from the left for having the nerve to agree with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly about problems in the black community.
On Fox News’s Happening Now Monday, liberal talk radio host Alan Colmes marvelously stated, “We’ll have true equality in this country when someone like Don Lemon or any other person of color can make a statement that doesn't conform with what the so-called majority believes without being called names, without being called an Uncle Tom” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Appearing as a panel member on the Sunday, July 28, Melissa Harris-Perry show, MSNBC political analyst Michael Eric Dyson declared that, when FNC host Bill O'Reilly dined at Sylvia's restaurant in 2007, he was "surprised that black people don't throw bananas at each other or swing from trees."
His attack on O'Reilly was the latest example of MSNBC personalities reviving a 2007 smear against O'Reilly claiming that the FNC host was surprised that patrons at a predominantly black restaurant in Harlem behaved in a civilized manner when, in reality, O'Reilly was criticizing the media for its negative portrayal of African-Americans, and was using his visit to the restaurant to contrast the media characterization with the reality he had observed.
After host Harris-Perry showed a clip of O'Reilly's commentary on race issues from last week, Dyson began his response:
As singer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte appeared as a guest on Friday's All In show, MSNBC host Chris Hayes brought up Civil Rights Movement-era murder victim Emmett Till and wondered if Trayvon Martin's death would have a similar "catalyzing effect" in a "civil rights struggle."
While both acknowledged that the circumstances were different, Belafonte lumped in Trayvon Martin as having been "murdered" and observed:
“It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission” states an adage that the staff of the New Republic magazine has apparently adopted, especially when it comes to writing disparaging things about George Zimmerman, the man who was found not guilty of murdering black teenager Trayvon Martin three weeks ago.
In an essay entitled “The Law That Acquitted Zimmerman Isn't Racist But That Doesn't Mean the Outcome Wasn't,” Richard Ford -- a Stanford law professor -- claimed: “Zimmerman was an edgy basket case with a gun who had called 911 46 times in 15 months, once to report the suspicious activities of a seven-year-old black boy.”