Olbermann Shouts Racist
Posted Under: Uncategorized
Sunday Paper - February 21st, 2010
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has offered another of his mindless rants that he calls “Special Commentaries.” This time, he tried to rile up his audience by throwing around vague charges of racism against white people, including himself!
People–especially anti-Obama Tea Partiers–are surrounded and motivated by racism, Olbermann said, huffing and puffing in righteous indignation. This helps explain why Obama is losing popularity and his policies are failing, he implied.
Olbermann’s diagnosis is correct, at least in part. Taking him at his word, he is a racist, and so is his network. Is this why there are no black faces hosting MSNBC political talk shows? Perhaps Olbermann will continue this series of commentaries by naming the CEO of NBC Universal (parent company of MSNBC), Jeff Zucker, as the worst person in the world!
“I think,” the MSNBC host said, “having now been one [a white person] for 51 years, I am permitted to say I believe prejudice and discrimination still sit, defeated, dormant, or virulent, somewhere in the soul of each white man in this country.”
Does it sit that way in Olbermann’s mind? What exactly is he talking about anyway?
He continued, “But facts don’t matter when you’re looking for an excuse to say you hate this president (but not because he’s black).”
The tired race card approach to politics and current events would not normally require any response or comment. It could be dismissed for what it is, coming from a questionable source who deals in vile rhetoric and regularly denounces people as “the worst” in the world.
But it is fascinating and worthy of comment because of what it says not only about Olbermann but the network which pays him so much to generate the high ratings that he wants but cannot get. According to Bill Carter of the New York Times, in January CNN surpassed MSNBC for the first time in six months in the ratings, and Fox has approximately triple the ratings of either CNN or MSNBC. So maybe the latest “Special Commentary” is an attempt to see who is paying attention and actually watching the show. We at AIM plead “guilty as charged,” at least in this special case. Please forgive us.
Playing into Olbermann’s hands, one is tempted to tune in to the next program, if only to see whether Olbermann will take the dramatic next step of setting himself on fire in protest of something or other, real or imagined. What will happen next? Will he show up drunk? Will he turn up missing? Does anyone care?
Olbermann seems determined to make himself into a martyr for some cause which only he seems to understand. It is not pretty but it is somewhat entertaining. Perhaps he will next allege that he is receiving special instructions from the ghost of Edward R. Murrow, the broadcasting legend that Olbermann shamelessly tries to imitate.
A pasty white man who tried to act like he is blacker than Al Sharpton, Olbermann deployed the race card in this commentary and suggested that white people are racists if they oppose the agenda of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama, only one of whom is black. He acknowledged his use of terms like “Tea Klux Klan” might be “incendiary,” but it’s only because he’s so “angry that at so late a date we still have to bat back that racial uneasiness which envelops us all.”
He didn’t rationally explain why resistance to an agenda pushed by white liberals in Congress should be considered racist. But nothing about Olbermann’s show at this point makes any rational sense. He is lashing out, apparently angry that liberal policies are crashing and burning, just like his ratings…
by Roger Aronoff
Olbermann Still Playing the Race Card
Read more at Accuracy in Media - February 16th, 2010
(continues below)
Stung by the reaction to his baseless charges of racism against the Tea Party movement, MSNBC-TV host Keith Olbermann did something he rarely does–he cited on the air some of the criticism of his remarks, including from my column carried by GOPUSA and other Internet sites. He did this without labeling his critics as being among “the worst” people in the world. But he fell far short of coming clean about why he launched his smears.
What’s more, he failed to retract the bogus charges and examine the many white faces that dominate–in fact, monopolize–the political talk shows on the network that employs him.
To recap, Olbermann, a white liberal, claimed that the Tea Party movement was racist against black people. This racism accounts for Obama’s failures and declining popularity, he suggested. As proof, he cited racism that he said lurked in the souls of every white person, including his own. Racism is everywhere, Olbermann said, apparently seriously.
Leading into a segment during the show, he said, “I wanted to give some equal time to those on the right who disagreed with the focus of Monday’s Special Comment that there is an alarming homogeneity at the so called Tea Party events, and that this is not some kind of demographic coincidence. In other words, they are almost all white people and this is in essence a white people’s party.”
He then showed quotes from Michelle Malkin’s blog, Hot Air, and from David Horowitz’s blog, NewsReal, responding to his comments from Monday night. Then he showed a screenshot of my column, carried on the website GOPUSA.com and said, “And lastly from the GOPUSA website.” He then quoted most of one line, which was that, “The tired race card approach to politics and current events would not normally require any response or comment. It could be dismissed for what it is, coming from a questionable source who deals in vile rhetoric…”
At least he got the quote right, though he failed to acknowledge that the source of the column on the GOPUSA site was actually Accuracy in Media.
Following each of the three comments he cited, he said, “My response to this would be, where are the people of color at the tea parties?”
He then concluded with the following: “But this isn’t rhetoric, this isn’t invective. It’s not about education or ranting, and is not the playing of a card. It’s math. The question none of these defenders will touch because there is no answer to it, where are the people of color at the tea parties?”
My column, in fact, did examine that issue. I cited and linked to two different YouTube videos of black men who proudly spoke at last September’s Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C., and were very warmly received. How many blacks were in the audience? My colleague, Cliff Kincaid, who covered the protest and took pictures of it, saw some blacks in the crowd, although he didn’t count them.
It’s a safe guess that the number of blacks at the 9-12 demonstration was short of the black percentage of the general population. But what does that prove? Such a gap doesn’t prove that the people who did show up were racists, or that the theme of the protest was racist in nature. In fact, the theme was anti-Big Government. And to repeat–the organizers actually did pick blacks to be speakers.
By contrast, Olbermann and the other white faces on MSNBC-TV were deliberately picked by Jeff Zucker and the other suits that run the network. They did not pick one black face to host a political talk show. Olbermann’s response on the Daily Kos was that he has blacks on his show as guests. This is a variation of the “some of my best friends are black” routine. This kind of response is what adds to the perception among some conservatives that Olbermann just cannot be taken seriously. It also helps explain why his routines have become the subject of jokes on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show.
Assuming that he is serious, however, one can take a look at the home page of MSNBC-TV and find that it shows 10 white faces and no people of color who host or co-host their own shows on the network. To paraphrase Olbermann, “Where are the people of color on MSNBC-TV?”…
by Roger Aronoff
Olbermann’s Fuzzy Math on Race
Read more at Accuracy in Media - February 18th, 2010
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