Race Issues

The Los Angeles Times has been doing its best to dismiss Senator Harry Reid's racist remark about Preisdent Obama as a minor transgression while portraying Republicans calling for his resignation as political attack dogs. This coverage stands in stark contrast to the paper's coverage of the controversy surrounding former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in 2002 (h/t Patterico)."GOP…

"Harry Reid is no Trent Lott," argues Newsweek's Ben Adler in a January 11 The Gaggle blog post by the same name.Of course, nowhere in his brief blog post does Adler acknowledge the media's role in why that double standard is in play. Instead, Adler defends Reid, praising his "frank political assessment":

It was the thinnest of reeds, but that didn't stop George Stephanopoulos from clinging to it—twice—in doing his best for Harry Reid . . .  Appearing on GMA today, Steph stressed that Reid's remarks about then-candidate Obama being "light-skinned" and having no "negro dialect" were supposed to be "private."Stephanopoulos tried to put the best face on things during a conversation with weekend co-…

In keeping with the tradition of the holidays - the minds at MSNBC, the place for politics if you're of the lefty persuasion, decided rate the top 10 political stories of the decade. And leading this gang of masters of the political journalism universe was "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, who on the broadcast of his Dec. 24 program, announced that conservative activism, mainly the tea party…

CNN senior political analyst David Gergen went so far to compare the Senate’s cloture vote early Monday morning on ObamaCare to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Seconds after the Senate concluded its vote, Gergen lamented the party line vote, and contrasted it with the unanimous finding of the Supreme Court which ended the segregation of schools [audio clips from segment available…

If there's a Ground Zero for America's foreclosure mess outside of much of California and metro Las Vegas, it's probably Cleveland, the Northeast Ohio city known in most of the rest of the state as the Mistake on the Lake. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Mark Gillespie got out from behind his desk, committed some good old-fashioned journalism, and went looking for the mistakes that exacerbated the…

It might seem a little strange to see Fox News bashed on its Fox broadcast parent network, but that's what you would have witnessed if you tuned into "The Wanda Sykes Show," Saturday night's late-night alternative to NBC's "Saturday Night Live." On the Dec. 12 broadcast of "The Wanda Sykes Show," Sykes, made famous for her attacks on conservative talker Rush Limbaugh and former Alaska Gov. Sarah…

The New York Times '09 Holiday Gift Guide page has some intriguing suggestions.There's the "Holiday Books Guide," the "Personal Tech Holiday Gift Guide," the guide for people of color...Wait. A separate gift page for people of color? Yes. The NYT Picker blog noticed the Times has a special gift section for non-whites:We don't like to throw around words like "racist" in the same sentence as the…

Surely no one would be foolish enough to defend Harry Reid's statement analogizing ObamaCare opponents to those who resisted the abolition of slavery, right? Um, may I introduce you to Donny Deutsch?On Morning Joe today, the ad man suggested to RNC Chairman Michael Steele that there was nothing wrong with Reid's analogy.  When Steele didn't deign to dignify Deutsch's absurdity with a response, a…

While interviewing Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele on Tuesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith referred to recent comments by Senator Harry Reid: “[He] said Republicans are on the wrong side of history when it comes to this health care bill and very soberly...compared those who opposed health care to those who opposed civil rights legislation....How would you respond to that?”Steele…

Associated Press headline:Tiger’s Troubles Widen His Distance From Blacks‘Two layers of suspicion ... one is the pattern in the race of his partners’The article that followed labeled the golfer racist not only for "declin[ing] to identify himself as black," but also because of "the race of the women" he's involved with.On top of this, the AP made the case that America's fascination with Woods's…

There's nothing like tuning into an episode of "The View" for a little exploration of social sensitivities in the modern American culture. In keeping with that tradition, on Black Friday, a term used to describe the Friday following Thanksgiving, which is the beginning of the traditional Christmas shopping season, the use of the word "black" to mark this occasion was a topic of discussion on "…

I haven’t seen “The Blind Side” yet, so I won’t say anything about the quality of the film. But based on the trailer and the true story, my wife and I are as excited about this as any film in a long time. It tells the true story of the adoption of Michael Oher by the Tuohy family in Tennessee and how they helped him go from homeless teenager to professional football star. The book was incredible…