Thursday, January 30, 2014

Does Fox Do This?

Here's a recent roundup of the vileness on MSNBC:
MSNBC President Phil Griffin apologized Thursday for what he called an "offensive" network tweet, which suggested that conservatives may “hate” a Cheerios Super Bowl ad featuring a racially mixed family.

Griffin said the person responsible for the tweet was fired...

"We can have our political disagreements with MSNBC," (Republican National Committee Chairman) Priebus said in an email blast earlier Thursday. "But using biracial families to launch petty and ridiculous political attacks is low, even by MSNBC's standards. It only coarsens our political discourse. This is more than just a tweet or an offhand comment. This is part of a pattern of behavior that has gotten markedly worse."

The Cheerios commercial features the same biracial family that appeared in an ad for the cereal brand last year. The ad sparked controversy after highlighting a family with a white mother and a black father.  Priebus also noted a string of other controversies MSNBC has faced for criticizing Republicans.

In his complaint to MSNBC, Priebus referenced Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir, who were both let go from the network after they made offensive comments about homosexuals and Sarah Palin, respectively.

Melissa Harris-Perry, host of a weekend show, also apologized this month after a panel on her program made jokes involving Mitt Romney's adopted black grandchild.
It's clear there's a culture of such filth and vilification of "others" at MSNBC, but at least the sunlight had enough of a disinfectant quality that they felt the need to fire those responsible.

Liberals always need someone to hate.

Update:  We get a two-fer on the subject today:
But making broad and essentially pejorative generalizations about giant swaths of non-Democrats is hardly the exclusive domain of the racist-chasers at MSNBC and Salon.com. Journalistic outlets at the highest levels have been making non-jokey versions of the same accusation throughout the Obama presidency, ever since the twin ascension in 2009 of the Tea Party and opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

For an example, check out this passage in New Yorker Editor David Remnick's extraordinarily long and often insightful recent profile of the president...

This isn't just bad journalism, it's bad tolerance. Attributing a single set of personality traits to scores of millions of people whose only commonality is age and race is the opposite of judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. It's also a cheap way to wave off the substance of anti-Obama criticism—why bother figuring out why a majority of Americans have consistently disliked the flawed Affordable Care Act when you can just roll your eyes and assert that the real reason is white anxiety and worse? There is nothing tolerant about assuming that those who have different ideas than you about the size and scope of government are motivated largely by base ethnic tribalism.

1 comment:

maxutils said...

MSNBC has had more than its share of controversy lately ... and since FOX fired Glenn Beck, they really haven't. But if you watch either network regularly, and I do, it would be completely disingenuous to try to argue that either one of them didn't have a bias. Chris Matthews makes we want to tear my hair out, but so does Sean Hannity ... and his perennial whipping boy, Alan Colmes. While I tend to think FOX is more accurate, if you look at the Jon Stewart monologues where he shows every single Rupert Murdoch planned talking point, I think you can make a very strong case for them not pursuing actual journalism ... Shepard Smith being the one exception. On MSNBC, they don't even seem to try. I like Rachel Maddow, but the rest of their lineup is ...awful. And way too many idiotic statements have been made in recent months. My thought is that they are trying for outrage, because their ratings are awful...