While it's performing a long overdue housecleaning, MSNBC should point its broom in Melissa Harris-Perry's direction and sweep her off the network for her anti-democratic, violence-advocating rant earlier this week at Cornell University.
Among other things, Harris-Perry told her audience that George Zimmerman deserved whatever injuries he received at the hands of Trayvon Martin in the violent February 2012 confrontation which began with Martin pommeling Zimmerman and ended in Martin's death.
Soon after 18-year-old Michael Brown was gunned down by an unidentified policeman on Sunday afternoon in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, Rev. Al Sharpton arrived on the scene to “speak up for the family of the victim” and spend a great deal of time in the spotlight.
However, the host of MSNBC's weekday afternoon PoliticsNation program quickly became the target of several critics, one of whom accused him of being a publicity-seeking “coon.” Sharpton shot back that “using a racial term tells you more about him than me.”
Attorneys for NBC News are feverishly working to get a judge to toss out a defamation lawsuit filed by George Zimmerman, claiming, oddly enough, that Mr. Zimmerman's prior work seeking to get justice for a homeless black man made him a "limited purpose" public figure. Nevermind that that's a side of Zimmerman's community involvement which the peacock network didn't really care to report as its skewed reporting suggested he was a racist.
From Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple's May 1 blog post (emphases mine):
If there was anyone in America who recklessly rushed to prematurely proclaim a position on George Zimmerman, it was Joe Scarborough. Before Zimmerman had even been arrested, at a time when even Al Sharpton was being relatively cautious with his language, Scarborough used his Morning Joe platform to brand Zimmerman a "murderer."
But there was Scarborough on today's show with the gall to condemn conservatives who "raced blindly" to embrace Zimmerman. View the video after the jump.
Nancy Grace blasted Piers Morgan on the latter's CNN program on Monday for unsurprisingly forwarding gun control in the middle of a panel discussion on the controversial Michael Dunn case: "It's not really right for a Brit to jump up and start talking to us about gun control." Morgan shot back by condescending to the HLN host specifically and to Americans in general: "It seems like it's entirely down to a Brit, because your lot can't sort out your own gun problems."
Grace, who is no stranger to controversy, interrupted the British native before he could finish his pro-gun control rant, and threw the American Revolution and the Constitution at the CNN host: [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]
Conservative Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has offered some New Year’s resolutions for the news business. He began by noting legendary columnist H. L. Mencken in his day at the Baltimore Sun said he was hard-pressed to to name five papers that conducted themselves as fairly and honestly “as the average nail factory.”
“If Mencken were alive today, would his opinion of the news business be less pungent? My guess is it would be even more so,” Jacoby guessed. “The journalistic sins and scams he was blasting a century ago are still being committed, only now the perps are more likely to have Ivy League degrees and to regard their occupation as a lofty profession.” But he offered some suggestions for self-improvement:
As NewsBusters previously reported, film director Spike Lee last March retweeted a posting supposedly including the address of George Zimmerman.
Now the couple who actually reside at that address are suing Lee.
As NewsBusters reported Sunday, the national news media outside of local New York outlets has totally ignored a New York man becoming brain dead as the result of an unprovoked attack by a man that shouted "I hate white people."
The victim, 62-year-old Jeffrey Babbitt, died Monday.
Will media report it now?
The folks at Funny or Die have decided to take on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman/Stand Your Ground issue with a video introducing the Black NRA.
In it, Sarah Silverman says, "Our fund will put guns into the hands of those that need them most: young black males" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
NewsBusters reported Saturday that the trustee of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, is trying to get an asteroid named after Trayvon Martin.
At roughly the same time Saturday, the Alabama State University marching band paid tribute to Martin during halftime festivities of a football game in Jackson, Mississippi, which included actually spelling "Trayvon":
The race-baiting media are going to be put to a serious challenge in the coming days following a tragic hate crime committed in New York City's Union Square Wednesday.
As CBS's New York affiliate reported late Friday evening, a retired train conductor was left brain dead when an African-American man unknown to him attacked him after shouting "I hate white people" (video follows with commentary):