MSNBC Host Makes Fun of Mitt Romney’s Black Grandson

[Drtooth]

It would have been interesting to see the reaction if instead of MSNBC we substituted Fox News. Me thinks we'd be seeing a different reaction. Wrong is wrong, regardless of race, gender, sexual preference or politics.

I'd say the direction is exactly the same, but the consequences are different. Once again, I'm not saying one side is right or wrong, but stating the different stigma each side faces. I see one side being neurotic and apologetic, and the other side just going with it and not caring. The latter isn't necessarily a bad thing, either. I just don't buy one party being as bad as the other, so much as they're both bad for different reasons I don't wanna go into.

Still, if someone on Fox News said it, other than a Jon Stewart monologue, no one would care or even know about it. They say outrageous things for the sake of saying outrageous things, and I personally just write them off anyway. I don't see why other cable news stations can't be written off as easily as outrageous nonsense as well. I mean, Jim Cramer has a career. That proves that they're all as bad as Fox is.

 

[jvcarroll]

No Excuses for MSNBC

The jokes seemed to be stem from the panel rather than the host, but there was absolutely no excuse for the behavior of anyone featured in that segment. I'm glad that Melissa Harris-Perry provided a swift apology that offered no excuses. She's a very intelligent woman and I admire her very much. It just makes me wonder if everyone just gets a case of the stupids once a camera is pointed in their face.


Why Do So Many Fox News Hosts Still Have Their Jobs?

That said, there are racist, sexist and homophobic remarks made Fox News by Hannity, O'Reilly, Kelly, Carlson and many others on a near daily basis in recent years. MSNBC's recent transgressions have not gone unnoticed, but they're far fewer than Fox and they ended up dismissing two hosts (Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir) shortly after their offenses. I'm still waiting for Hannity to get canned for his atrocious, unChristian behavior or O'Reilly for his horrible remarks about transgender people. All the cable news networks are irresponsible these days, yet only MSNBC seems to be taking some responsibility for that.

 

[Drtooth]

^^^^

That. ALL of that. Really, saying "both sides are exactly the same" is nothing but an over simplification and pretty much a black and black world view. Not even black and white.

My point is, there's a HUGE helping of disproportionate retribution when it comes to right wing pundits vs. left wing pundits. If everything was so even, Air America wouldn't have collapsed during the Bush administration. Seriously... selling anti-Bush sentiment to liberals and failing at it is like not being able to sell space heaters in the arctic. Anti-Bush books went to the comedy sections of book stores, anti-Obama books go to the current events section. A professor pulled Godwin's Law and called Bush "Hitler" and was fired and made into an eeeeeevil spectacle of how colleges are brainwashing kids to be liberal, calling Obama "Hitler" gets you a book deal, a talk radio show, and it's the basis of an oh so American anti-government group. No better example is the NPR reporter (or was it commentator?) that said something about not being comfortable on airplanes when there's a Muslim on board, NPR couldn't fire him fast enough, and Fox couldn't scoop him up fast enough, either.

Separate and NOT equal

Now, if Fox was just saying racist, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-social things as per usual, I just ignore it. Everyone should. That's dog bites man news. But the thing is, whenever someone on the left says anything vaguely racist, they hop up and down on one foot and point shouting "YOU'RE A RACIST! YOU'RE A RACIST!" With the maturity and dignity of the school yard bully that somehow never manages to get in trouble but makes darn well sure everyone else does. And believe me, I knew quite a few in my day.

And I saw this next example with my own eyes.... Harry Reid or someone said something stupid about Obama (Something about being an articulate black man or something)... Glenn "Danger to Himself and others" Beck was literally surrounded by the African American pundits Fox rarely uses to say how horribly racist liberals are. Punctuated by Glenn feigning lucidity and not crawling on the floor making creepy voices to make a point. Yup. Fox called out a liberal for saying something less awful (but still pretty bad) than they say on a daily basis. That's not the pot calling the kettle black... that's a pot of burnt octopus ink making a spectacle of itself to try to convince you it's whiter than a white ceramic pot full of white rice and milk.

 

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No Excuses for MSNBC

The jokes seemed to be stem from the panel rather than the host, but there was absolutely no excuse for the behavior of anyone featured in that segment. I'm glad that Melissa Harris-Perry provided a swift apology that offered no excuses. She's a very intelligent woman and I admire her very much. It just makes me wonder if everyone just gets a case of the stupids once a camera is pointed in their face

What happened was Harris-Perry cheekily asked if anyone on the panel had any captions for the photo and one of the panelists then did the "one of these things" comment. Then another panelist joked, "That photo represents the diversity of the Republican party!" Harris-Perry was right to take responsibility since it was her show and she encouraged the joking around. It really wasn't that big a deal, it was just really immature. And it's worse when it's directed at children. It's the kind of conversation I'm sure they've had a million times between friends and they forgot to be professional on camera. MSNBC does it all the time and so does FOX. It's editorial news, I don't mind things being a little loose, but yeah, sometimes you face the consequences for saying stupid things. This isn't stand up comedy, it's supposed to be news.

 

[Drtooth]

Fox only apologizes for extreme cases. Barely then. They did fire Glenn Back, which I give them credit for, but that's because he said something so extreme, it caused them to lose sponsors. It's not about taking responsibility in that case, more like not trying to lose any money. And it was win win, since Glen was able to take that "victimization" and turn it into an underground "stuff the government doesn't want you to hear" program that only catered further to the wackizoids that listen to his paranoid, inconsistent and self-contradicting conspiracy theories. No one lost a thing.

Then there's the case of the "White Santa" debacle from Megyn Kelly. Where they purposely trolled the internet for a story that would rile up the old white guys watching, and found a blog that essentially said something about Santa being envisioned by that blog poster as not white. They turned it into a whole "everyone's racist but whites" squaking point (a favorite of theirs), they threw out their own completely inaccurate historical "facts" (St. Nick was born in Turkey a place where people aren't exactly white), and then when everyone started calling them out on it, they pulled the old Parody Retcon. Yeah. After the fact when it made them look foolish and just a bit racist for going after a not so public person's blog post... cherry picked blog post, I might ad... Megyn pulled the "It was a joke!" excuse out of her butt. That's just poor on every level. Poor sportsmanship, poor journalism... just overall yet another sign that Fox is grasping at straws to pretend that white people are the true victims.

Meanwhile, some doofus on MSNBC makes a terrible joke (terrible as in of poor quality and unfunny... not even offensive enough to be funny awkwardly) about how the Republican Party isn't really good at diversity.

Bottom line... MSNBC apologized for a bad joke. Fox took an unimportant, anger inducing, manipulative cherry picked news story and pretended it was a bad joke.

 

[jvcarroll]

Fox only apologizes for extreme cases. Barely then. They did fire Glenn Back, which I give them credit for, but that's because he said something so extreme, it caused them to lose sponsors. It's not about taking responsibility in that case, more like not trying to lose any money. And it was win win, since Glen was able to take that "victimization" and turn it into an underground "stuff the government doesn't want you to hear" program that only catered further to the wackizoids that listen to his paranoid, inconsistent and self-contradicting conspiracy theories. No one lost a thing.

Then there's the case of the "White Santa" debacle from Megyn Kelly. Where they purposely trolled the internet for a story that would rile up the old white guys watching, and found a blog that essentially said something about Santa being envisioned by that blog poster as not white. They turned it into a whole "everyone's racist but whites" squaking point (a favorite of theirs), they threw out their own completely inaccurate historical "facts" (St. Nick was born in Turkey a place where people aren't exactly white), and then when everyone started calling them out on it, they pulled the old Parody Retcon. Yeah. After the fact when it made them look foolish and just a bit racist for going after a not so public person's blog post... cherry picked blog post, I might ad... Megyn pulled the "It was a joke!" excuse out of her butt. That's just poor on every level. Poor sportsmanship, poor journalism... just overall yet another sign that Fox is grasping at straws to pretend that white people are the true victims.

Meanwhile, some doofus on MSNBC makes a terrible joke (terrible as in of poor quality and unfunny... not even offensive enough to be funny awkwardly) about how the Republican Party isn't really good at diversity.

Bottom line... MSNBC apologized for a bad joke. Fox took an unimportant, anger inducing, manipulative cherry picked news story and pretended it was a bad joke.

That's the issue I have with Fox. Their usual pattern is to glorify their terrible behavior, make excuses for it while playing the victim, or try to delete it from the web and rebroadcasts so they can pretend it never happened. It's a rare day that they ever take responsibility for any wrongdoing. I have seen O'Reilly shoulder a little blame on a few occasions. Oh, and we shouldn't forget the network's nonsensical attack on the First Lady for encouraging kids to drink more water and to exercise more; or the fact that they hammer the President for taking too many vacations when his vacation count is 1/4 that of Bush and close to the Clinton model. I used to like the fact that the existence of a conservative-leaning network kind of balanced things out. That is no longer the case. All news has inherent bias, but Fox has devolved into the most absurd propaganda machine on television by far.

Anyway, I was shocked by Harris-Perry's behavior. I'm certain that every panel on every cable news network makes such off color jokes during the commercial breaks, but this was a really troubling offense from a college professor and host for whom I had the utmost respect. She really is a remarkable lady. This was not the case on the day the segment aired. MSNBC needs to get their act together. They can bounce-back from this. They swiftely make the appropriate apologies. It just would be great if their recent behavior didn't warrant any.

 

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Anyway, I was shocked by Harris-Perry's behavior....but this was a really troubling offense from a college professor

Hmm, I guess your college professors were a little more mature than mine, lol.

 

[Drtooth]

That's the issue I have with Fox. Their usual pattern is to glorify their terrible behavior, make excuses for it while playing the victim, or try to delete it from the web and rebroadcasts so they can pretend it never happened. It's a rare day that they ever take responsibility for any wrongdoing.

I'll never forget this net example. I forget when it was exactly, but it was near the end of the Bush era. I was searching for pictures on the internet of Quagmire from Family Guy, and lo and behold the first result I got was a Fox News report on how the word "Quagmire" has been thrown around too much describing the then unpopular with everybody Iraq war.

This was when they were bad, but not as awful as recent years... but you know what that says? It says "Sure, we were probably wrong about that war, BUT everyone else is worse for rubbing it in our faces." That is the business model they've grown on. Angry, hateful talking points that turn into either parody retcons (like Megyn's idiotic Santa comments) or twisting them into being the victims when they're called on it, and then cherry picking some minor (yet stupid) infraction on the opposing side and blowing it out of proportion.

The funny thing is, this MSNBC thing comes to light just after Phil Robertson's comments, which were defended by everyone on the right with a loud enough voice and Starscream-y political aspirations (cough cough Palin cough cough and I don't mean Michael cough cough). If someone on the right said the exact same thing, not only would no one have to apologize, they'd be swamped with supporters who are living in the perpetual imaginary concept that the liberal PC police will (as I said in another thread) jump out of a cookie jar blowing a whistle, like Odie in the Garfield Thanksgiving Special.

It's completely unbalanced in that aspect. If they both had equal retribution, I wouldn't say a thing.

Anyway, I was shocked by Harris-Perry's behavior. I'm certain that every panel on every cable news network makes such off color jokes during the commercial breaks, but this was a really troubling offense from a college professor and host for whom I had the utmost respect. She really is a remarkable lady. This was not the case on the day the segment aired. MSNBC needs to get their act together. They can bounce-back from this. They swiftely make the appropriate apologies. It just would be great if their recent behavior didn't warrant any.

I think all cable news is crap. I agree completely with Anchorman 2's underlying concept. 24 hours of news sounds convenient, but no one's going to watch it unless you give the audience something to watch (i.e. dumbing things down to an extreme). be it bias, crappy CGI graphics, blowhards, or making national panics about one thing that happened that one time (i.e. drug use in kids, finding ways around not having drugs, and Twerking- something from over 10 years ago-that's some slippery slope to hard core sex or something to scare old people who thought their parents were prudes when Elvis was popular).

Her comments were dumb, but in a special poorly formed snarky opinion sort of way. In context:

Phil Robertson threw around bible quotes and nasty comparisons cuz gays gross him out, and made terrible statements about Jim Crow laws because he's rich and doesn't want to pay taxes that go to help poor people. Hateful statements to justify outdated, self-important beliefs.

Harris-Perry made a lousy joke about how white a former political figure whom liberals don't like too much is. Passive aggressive snark aimed at...let's face it... a crappy politician even the right only got behind because they didn't want to waste the 2012 election on a rising star (essentially the right wing reversal of the 2004 election and John Kerry) .

No comparison, really. Both are bad, but one's stealing a pack of gum, one's stealing a car at gunpoint.

 

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I do feel it necessary to point out the Romneys are a political family and being publicly made fun of does kinda come with the territory. Still, supposedly children are supposed to be off limits and that's why people are annoyed with the MSNBC panelists.