Race Issues

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean on Sunday accused the Fox News Channel of being racist.With the opening subject of "Fox News Sunday" being last week's controversial termination of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod, Dean said, "I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a, they had an obligation to find out what was really within…

(Update:  Reuters quietly improves statement by eliminating the word 'often'.  Thank you Reuters, for being forthright in the error, er, slipping this in, in the hopes that your readers won't notice.  We're certain that all of the Tea Party Patriots being wrongfully portrayed as racist appreciate the effort.) Reuters recently ran a piece that analyzed persistent race issues amidst the Obama…

 For two days in a row on her noontime news hour, MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer worried aloud about the White House bowing to the wishes of the conservative media on the Shirley Sherrod case, describing it as "towing to right-wingers.""In some ways, it makes it look like the White House is kowtowing to right-wingers here, Mike," Brewer told MSNBC correspondent Mike Viqueira Wednesday as she was…

Rick "I play it down the middle" Sanchez didn't disappoint during the first prime-time edition of CNN's Rick's List on Thursday, as he brought his liberal bias against Fox News to the program. When guest Dan Abrams of Mediate accused the anchor of "doing an opinion-based program" on Fox News's coverage of the Shirley Sherrod story, Sanchez denied this and added that he wasn't being ideological […

Appearing on Friday's CBS Early Show to discuss the Shirley Sherrod controversy, Ann Coulter pointed out the network's own faulty reporting on tea partiers protesting the passage of ObamaCare: "CBS News itself has reported that John Lewis was called the 'N' word 15 times. That is a lie, that is a despicable lie, that never happened. Why doesn't CBS News apologize for that?" [Audio available here…

On Thursday's Early Show on CBS, their interview with radical black leftist Michael Eric Dyson was preceded by a Jan Crawford news story stuffed with Team Obama apologies to Shirley Sherrod for their quick and dirty firing via BlackBerry. The only non-adminstration (or non-apologizing) soundbite in the story was radical black leader Julian Bond:  CRAWFORD: But the controversy seems to show that…

On Thursday’s The View on ABC, as the group hosted former USDA official Shirley Sherrod to talk about her experience of being fired by the Obama administration, after co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck got her to address comments she had made before the NAACP in which she accused Republicans of challenging President Obama on health care reform because he is black, co-host Joy Behar went on a tirade…

It wasn't exactly a media-friendly question. CNN co-anchor Kiran Chetry asked Shirley Sherrod on Thursday's "American Morning" if she wanted another news outlet to be shut down entirely – Andrew Breitbart's website, to be exact. "Would you like [Breitbart's] site to be shut down?" Chetry asked Sherrod. Sherrod answered yes, "that would be a great thing."In lieu of Sherrod's recent travails, CNN…

Rick Sanchez, who hosts his Rick's List program for two hours during the afternoon on CNN, will be taking on the network's 8 pm Eastern hour slot for several weeks between Campbell Brown's departure on Wednesday and the start of the ex-Democratic Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer (the infamous Client #9) and sometime-conservative Kathleen Parker's new program.Sanchez will likely bring his two-…

My colleagues Brad Wilmouth and Lachlan Markay have catalogued how Fox News hosts played no role in the forced resignation of former USDA bureaucrat Shirley Sherrod over perceived racist remarks.But why let the truth get in the way of a good screed? Just ask Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, who published a postmortem yesterday to the magazine's The Gaggle blog on "[h]ow the administration mishandled a…

An indignant Anderson Cooper railed against Andrew Breitbart with an uncharacteristic angry commentary at the top of his eponymous CNN program yesterday, calling the conservative activist a "bully," likening him to a "weasel," and accusing him of posting a video which was "clearly edited to deceive and slander [Shirley] Sherrod."Admitting he has never met Breitbart, Cooper preached, "Watching him…

On Thursday's CBS Early Show, fill-in co-host Erica Hill discussed the firing of Shirley Sherrod with left-wing Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, who used the opportunity to slam conservatives: "...there's unfair pressure on the Obama administration, Mr. Obama himself, from, I think, the far right wing, which perceives black gain at the expense of white security." Dyson used the…

The ongoing controversy surrounding the actions of two members of the New Black Panther Party at a Philadelphia polling place during the last presidential election has become increasingly less about facts and more about opinions. The mainstream media ignored the story for so long, basically giving Fox News exclusive rights to deliver the story to a mass audience and now they’re incensed over…

UPDATE (3:20 PM): A couple of quotes below the fold demonstrate just how ideologically diverse critics are who note that Fox played no direct role in Sherrod's resignation. Pundits from the Washington Post and National Review weigh in. Shirley Sherrod placed the blame for her ouster at Fox News's feet. Hardly surprising. She's a liberal (former) member of a liberal administration. More surprising…