CNN: Town Hall Protesters, Like the Founders, are White Supremacists

by David Forsmark  •  Aug 22, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Cross-posted from NewsRealBlog.com

http://www.davidforsmark.com/2009/08/cnn-town-hall-protesters-like-the-founders-are

Remember this?  It was an iconic symbol of the media's contempt for the Tea Party protesters, a CNN reporter arguing the Obama viewpoint in an extremely condescending and confrontational way.  Even some mainstream media commentators and former CNN reporters expressed embarassment at Susan Roesgen's unprofessionalism.

But if CNN thought this kind of thing was inappropriate, then their newest airhead Don Lemon didn't get the memo. While he didn't get caught on anyone's amateur video (that we know of yet), he felt compelled to brag in an interview with Tim Wise, the self -described "anti-racist essayist" and author of "White Like Me," that he too, took ignorant demonstrators "to task."  (Click here for the video.)

The interview mischaracterized quotes by at least two conservative commentators, and told several direct lies about what happened at a Missouri town meeting (refuted very well by Bill O'Reilly here)

Wise may have failed to live up to his last name, but Lemon is proving to be one for CNN.

Wise graced the viewers with gems like: "It gins up this type of hostility and really white racial paranoia and white racial resentment at a time when we need to be seriously talking about issues that face us as a nation and not being engaged in this kind of racial politics, but that's what's going on." All the while, Lemon nodded sagely.

That's bad enough, but then Lemon let his journalist mask slip the rest of the way:

LEMON: And here's the thing, and what I think many people don't get is that just because you're on the side of the camera that I'm on doesn't mean that you're always going to be objective….

Tim, I've got to run here, but just real quickly. I was at a town hall yesterday and I really had to take some people to task.   They're very nice people, but they're using those buzzwords that I don't think people realize all the time like "real Americans" or "Give Me Back My America"   was one of the songs, or "Take Back America." It's like where has — I don't — what do you mean by that?

WISE: Well, when you stand up and you wax nostalgic and say things like I want the country that the founders envisioned, when the country the founders envisioned was a formal system of white supremacy, excuse me if I found it a little hard to think that race is not perhaps playing a pretty big role.

LEMON: Tough talk from Tim Wise. Tim, we appreciate it. Thank you, sir.

Gee, Don, they couldn't mean we want to go back to a time when the government didn't own our major manufacturers, didn't run up deficits nearly as large as last year's budget, didn't try to set pay for private corporations, or wasn't trying to take over the one fifth of the American economy which deals with our most private and personal decisions. No, they must mean they are mad that we have a partially black president. Of course that's it.

Lemon, you may remember, made his first big YouTube splash when he had a hilarious reaction, almost jumping out of his seat, when  an African reporter told him that President Obama's welcome in Africa was not "unprecedented," as Lemon had asserted.

His condescending slur against everyday Americans might not be as funny as that; but his "reporting" is an ongoing joke.

receive the latest by email: subscribe to david forsmark's free mailing list