Media and Racism
http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2010-07-22/media-and-racism
The battle between the NAACP and the Tea Party movement took an unexpected twist this week, as the Department of Agriculture abruptly fired Shirley Sherrod over allegedly racist remarks at an NAACP meeting. Join Kojo as we look at the furor and rapid reversal of Sherrod's firing, and what this story says about politics and the media in the U.S.
Guests
Paul Delaney
veteran journalist and former editor and reporter at the New York Times.
Comments
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Kojo:
This is Kate Reed, the applied anthropologist. One of my specialties is helping Whites with their transition from racism to human understanding and especially assisting them to understand why they were racist in the first place. I hear all kinds of stories. Whatever the reason, it is self awareness and understanding that eventually shift the feelings and the deep rootedness of racism, whether the victim or the perpetrator.
Shirley Sherrod has walked in the steps of both George Wallace and Robert Byrd, in that, Wallace eventually said, I was wrong and Byrd decried his KKK past. Her whole speech reflects enlightenment, not continued ignorance. What both the Secretary of Agriculture and the President have done to this woman has set back my mission a thousand fold.
It takes courage and forgiveness to stand before a crowd at the NAACP and tell of one’s own prejudices and foibles. It also tells Blacks that “you or we are not without our own prejudices even in the face of having been victims of racism.” Shame on both the Secretary and the President for their unfairness, and their lack of homework. By the way, Obama should apologize, not send Gibbs to clean up his mess. They should give Ms. Sherrod a civil rights medal for her candor and moving prejudice from the realm of blame to the realm of personal responsibility.
Kojo,
You should not have said you were a black nationalist back in the day, Brietbart will only play that portion of your show.
At the most, Fox, and Breitbart are guilty of deliberately misrepresentation. At the least, they are guilty of shoddy journalism.
I wasn't able to listen to the whole of the show--I just managed to hear the first part, where your guest, stunningly, seemed to lay the blame on shoddy standards by *bloggers*. His argument was that, as far as I can tell, Breitbart got the story wrong because his "news organization" didn't have the savvy of the traditional news organizations, which would have been able to susss out that the tapes weren't on the up-and-up.
This is just staggeringly off-base. Where do you dredge up these guests? Breitbart, and subsequently Fox News got the story wrong because that's the whole *purpose* of The Daily Caller and Fox News. The journalistic crime here is that the very mainstream news organizations that your guest held up as the "grownups" failed spectacularly to vet the story before credulously running with it, just as they did after the ginned up ACORN debacle.
Josh Marshall of TPM writes about it here:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/07/shame_on_obama.php
His informed and nuanced take on the matter puts you guys to shame--its just another reason why I listen to NPR/WAMU as often as I can stand, but send my donation dollars elsewhere.
One last point: traditional media outlets from the NYT, to the Post, to NPR are constantly wringing their hands about how they don't cover these sorts of right-wing hoaxes quickly enough, or in great enough depth. If you have a problem with journalistic ethics, you should talk to the NYT Ombudsman, who has repeatedly said the Times dropped the ball by not giving the ACORN hoax sufficient coverage.