"Where are the People of Color"– in MSNBC's Lineup? Meltdown with Keith Olbermann Part 35

by David Forsmark  •  Feb 18, 2010 at 10:49 am
Cross-posted from NewsRealBlog.com

http://www.davidforsmark.com/2010/02/where-are-the-people-of-color-in-msnbcs-lineup

I once did a lot of freelancing for a daily newspaper called The Flint Journal, whose editorial pages regularly and vociferously called for "affirmative action." They were located in a majority black city, but very often they had few black writers and no black editors. If you wanted to keep working for them, pointing this out was not a good idea.

Last night, Keith Olbermann read reactions to his race-baiting rant the other night from conservative blogs Hot Air, GOPUSA, and the below bit from Meltdown with Keith Obermann Part 33:

FORSMARK: The next time Keith Olbermann calls you racist or any other hateful ephithet, take comfort in the fact that you are in the best possible company. In fact, if Keith Olbermann is not directing hate-filled rants of invective your way, that will be the time to second guess yourselves.

OLBERMANN "My resonse to this is: Where are the people of color at the tea partes.

That was Keith's response to each of the 3 excerpts he read– all of which were carefully selected to avoid the following issue– which I did, indeed, raise in my post

So, My response to this is: Where are the People of Color in MSNBC's Lineup?

OLBERMANN: And now the second of tonight's "Quick Comments," and still the topic is Tea. 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 sort of demographic coincidence. In other words, they're almost all white people, and this is, in essence, a white people's party. (click NewsReal link above for the video)

Well, your anchors are not "almost all,'" but are ALL "white people." So MSNBC is, by the standard YOU set, a white people's network.

Keith may have ignored it on his show, but in his Daily Kos column yesterday, he posted this very defensive response o Kos reader JoanMar who called him on this issue.

OLBERMANN:Lester Holt was our primary anchor at MSNBC until '04 or so, and he got promoted to NBC. And Alison Stewart had her own show and was my primary back-up (we got somebody named Rachel something to replace her), and then she went to raise a family (and do NPR for awhile) and now she's back part-time as Rachel's back-up, and Tamron is one of my back-ups and co-anchored her own two-hour political show in the afternoon, and you mentioned Christina Brown (call her "Christine" at your peril), and Carlos Watson had his own show (and that didn't work out very well for anybody, as will occasionally happen), and Gene Robinson is with me whenever he can spare the time (and is in the studio for all our long-form political coverage, and I try to glue him to the seat next to mine), and we get Clarence Page on whenever we can, and really we do as much astronomy as we do only because Derrick Pitts is so damn good, and somebody upthread mentioned Melissa Harris-Lacewell, and Paul Mooney used to come on for political comment. I'm not satisfied with this as the status quo, but I did want to balance the picture as much as it can be. And suddenly this got me thinking, I wonder if Derrick has ever thought about politics and tv…

Well, if you had a black anchor 6 YEARS AGO, all right then! Womder how Clarence and Gene feel today about being singled out as tokens by Keith Olbermann?

As Newsbusters points out today:

In a Thursday, February 11, CBS Evening News story, correspondent Nancy Cordes cited a CBS News/New York Times poll showing that 95 percent of Tea Party activists are white, suggesting that five percent – a number that is not insignificant – are minorities.

That's 5% better than the MSNBC anchor lineup.

I do not believe in using numbers like this to prove racism. I don't believe in setting quotas to "solve the problem." In the case of the Flint Journal, I know first hand the efforts they made at recruitment and the angst their white liberal guilt caused them over the situation.

The problem is, that liberal press organizations can give you all kinds of logical reasons as to the demographic makeup of their newsroom– but they do not accept similar explanations from businesses. Corporations are presumed guilty if they do not meet a proscribed balance in their hiring results– no matter how neutral their hiring practices can be proven to be.

One other point. MSNBC has been falsely accusing the Tea Party groups and Town Hall protesters of racism since the demonstrations began. When they were trying to whip up assassination plot hysteria about the gatherings, they notoriously hid the racial identity of an anti-Obama protester: (click NewsReal link for video)

Now, here is the same guy, same footage, which MSNBC deliberately re-edited to conceal the man's ethnic identity: (Click Newsreal link for video)

Okay, it's not news that MSNBC are crude propagandists, and Keith Olbermann does not broadcast in good faith. So…

My response to this is: Where are the People of Color in MSNBC's Lineup?

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