When he got a gig doing political commentary for CNN, hate-blogger Erick Erickson assured Howard Kurtz that he had realized that "I had to grow up in how I write." And Erickson convinced the New York Times that he had become a kinder, gentler pundit.

But hating is what Erickson does.  That's why it's unsurprising to find him on his blog (7/13/10) whipping up racial animus in the crudest possible terms, using the sort of rhetoric associated with actual brownshirts like David Duke. In the post, Erickson urged the Republicans to turn the New Black Panther "scandal" into the "21st century Willie Horton"--the ginned-up controversy being that the Obama administration failed to prosecute two members of a fringe Afrocentrist group for hanging around a polling place in a black neighborhood last November.

Look at the language Erickson uses to describe this:

The Democrats will scream racism. Let them. Republicans are not going to pick up significant black support anyway. But here's the thing: everyone but the Democrats will understand this is not racism. This isn't even about race. This is about the judgment of an administration that would rather prosecute Arizona for doing what the feds won't do than prosecuting violent thugs who would deny you and me the right to vote while killing our kids.

Is there anything more incendiary, more irresponsible than publicly hallucinating about "violent thugs...killing our kids"?

It's obvious from the context of his statement that by "you and me" he means "white people," and "our kids" are "white kids."

Yet it's not about race--and certainly not about racism.  It never is.

Reuters (7/14/10) has a report today on the efforts by senators Blanche Lincoln (D.-Arkansas) and Jon Kyl (R.-Arizona) to greatly reduce the amount wealthy estates owe in federal taxes.  Under current law, after a one-year suspension, the federal estate tax rate will return to its pre-2001 level of 55 percent, with the first $1 million exempt. Lincoln and Kyl's proposal would change the rate to 35 percent and exempt the first $5 million of an estate. This change would save millionaires $440 billion in its first decade, and add the same amount to the federal deficit.

How does Reuters report on this massive transfer of wealth to the rich?  Under the headline "Two Senators Propose Reinstating Estate Tax," reporter Kim Dixon begins her story, "Two senators, a Democrat and a Republican, have reintroduced a proposal to reinstate the estate tax, which lapsed this year amid a row among lawmakers over taxing the wealthy when they die."

The story does go on to note what the rates would be under the Lincoln/Kyl proposal compared to current law, but leaves the budget-busting math as an exercise for the reader.

The right-wing Newsmax site has a notably positive profile of CNN anchor John King. Why would they take such a liking to a member of the dreaded Liberal Media Establishment? Newsmax's Ron Kessler gives his reason:

When contributor Erick Erickson of RedState.com leaves out a point that might buttress his conservative arguments, King gladly supplies it.

To hear some of the Beltway media tell it, on Sunday White House press secretary Robert Gibbs predicted that the Democrats could lose their congressional majority in the November midterms.  The L.A. Times captured some of the sense of crisis (7/14/10), noting that

party leaders also tried to improve the gloomy prognosis. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, reversing course from comments he made over the weekend, said Tuesday he now believed Democrats would retain control of the House, a sentiment shared by the House majority leader, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland.

It's odd, then, to look at what actually Gibbs said on NBC's Meet the Press--which does not seem at all controversial:

DAVID GREGORY: Two final points.  First of all, I want to get a prediction from you on, back on the political debate.  Is the House in jeopardy, the majority for the Democrats in the House, in jeopardy?

ROBERT GIBBS: I think there's no doubt that there are a lot of seats that will be up, a lot of contested seats.  I think people are going to have a choice to make in the fall.  But I think there's no doubt there are enough seats in play that could cause Republicans to gain control.  There's no doubt about that. This will depend on strong campaigns by Democrats. And again, I think we've got to take the issues to them.  You know, are--do you want to put into the speakership of the House, a guy who thinks that the financial calamity is, is tantamount to an ant?  The guy who's the ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe Barton, started his congressional testimony of the CEO of BP by apologizing, not to the people in the Gulf, but to the CEO.  I think that's a perfect window, not into what people are thinking, but the way they would govern.  Joe Barton, John Boehner, those are the type of things you'll hear a lot, I think, from both the president and local candidates about what you'd get if the Republicans were to gain control.

Somehow this message--that mathematically speaking the Republicans could win in November if Democrats do not run strong campaigns--is the one Beltway pundits and reporters misrepresented and seized on.

A  more revealing exchange in the same Meet the Press interview came when host David Gregory asked a question that was essentially posed from the left, wondering if Obama's campaign rhetoric about breaking with Bush-era practices had been all talk:

The promise to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, yet it's still open. The Afghanistan war is not scaled down, it's been escalated. This administration has upheld the state secrets exemption in its pursuit of terrorists legally. It appears the worst-kept secret in Washington is that there appears to be abandoned plans to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in front of a civilian trial. Same strategy for North Korea and Iran, basically.

Gibbs'  response was to argue that the Obama White House has outflanked the Bush administration to the right on some of these issues--a much more revealing window into White House thinking than Gibbs' completely uncontroversial take on the midterms.

GIBBS: I hate to interrupt, but let's understand this. We have the toughest sanctions on North Korea that we've ever had as a result of unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution.

GREGORY: Same strategy. Same strategy.

GIBBS: Same strategy...

GREGORY: Pursued by the Bush administration.

GIBBS: More important, better tactics. We've got the strongest sanctions regime on Iran that has ever been in place. And, David, go back...

GREGORY: Same strategy as the Bush administration.

GIBBS: But, but understand--let's go back to the Bush administration.

GREGORY: Yeah.

GIBBS: You brought this up. I know the next panel's going to say I blamed this all on the Bush administration...

GREGORY: No, no, no. But can I just finish?

GIBBS: But--let me...

GREGORY: The predicate here, which is, is it harder to do a reversal from Bush foreign policy than you originally thought?

GIBBS: No, because I think you've greatly oversimplified it. It--if you ask Ed Gillespie, ask any of the folks that you had right now, if in September of 2008 or October of 2008 or November of 2008 whether China and Russia were going to come on board for strengthening sanctions against Iran. The answer to that would be a flat no. You wouldn't have gotten to the Security Council because you would have had at least two countries raise their hand to veto those. This president has put together a coalition that includes Russia and China, that's actually strengthened our sanctions regime on South Korea [sic]. We have better relationships with virtually every country in the world as a result of the president's foreign policy outreach. We're reducing nuclear weapons in this world that we know can cause the type of calamity, whether they accidentally launch or whether they fell into the hands of a terrorist. There's no doubt, David, that we have taken foreign policy in a different direction. We have improved relationships with countries, but not just as a means to an ends. That's actually making our country safer and more secure as a result. I think you created, oversimplified, sort of, what the president is trying to do, because the things that he's instituted couldn't have been done in the last administration.

"Same strategy...better tactics." If that's the new White House motto, that's a lot more newsworthy than saying that Democrats are going to have to work hard to win the midterms.

No, that's not a typo: Only 1.6 percent of sports coverage on L.A.'s three major network affiliates went to women's sports. On ESPN Sportscenter, it's 1.4 percent. It's just slightly higher when you add in ticker-tape coverage. And it's getting worse, not better: Those numbers are down from about 5 percent in 1989. And a major part of that drop, according to study co-author Michael Messner of the University of Southern California, is because of a drop in "insulting or trivialization or humorous sexualization of women athletes, like a nude bungee jumper or leering court reports on tennis players like Anna Kournikova or later Maria Sharapova."

Messner explained:

When you see that kind of coverage disappear, what also disappears is coverage of women's sports at all. I think part of this has to do with the fact that a lot of these sports reporters, on the evening news especially, are the same guys, basically, who we saw in 1989 and 1993: Fred Rogan at KNBC, Jim Hill at KCBS, it's the same reporters and they are doing the same stuff. I think one of the keys to this when thinking about Sportscenter and the evening news is it's kind of a men's club, though Sportscenter does include a couple of women reporters, but the news shows really don't. It's been really interesting this week since our report came out: Only women reporters have seen fit to cover this as a story. I think there is some reason to think if we could desegregate the sports desk on newspapers and in TV news and so forth, you might get a little bit more respectful coverage of women's sports....

I think they make conscious decisions about what they cover every day, but I think there is a tremendous amount of inertia as well. And only a part of it has to do with the fact it's men making most of these decisions. Men are capable of doing really good sports reporting on women's sports, and a lot of men really like women's sports. But I think there is a fear on a lot of their parts if they don't stay with the big three sports. About three-fourths of all the news coverage we saw was of men's football, men's basketball and men's baseball. So it is important that we recognize that it's not just women's sports that are getting edged out of this, it's a whole lot of the other men's sports as well.

It's not that women's sports are unpopular. As Messner points out, more than 11 million people attended NCAA women's basketball games in 2009-10, and Title IX has helped foster an explosion in girls' participation in sports in recent decades. But with male-heavy newsrooms and intense bottom-line pressures from the bosses, there's just no room in corporate reporting for the female half of sports news.

Read Dave Zirin's interview with Messner at TheNation.com (7/6/10).

TV Sports Coverage Graph

In a news report on the Israeli military's investigation of its own deadly raid on the Gaza aid flotilla, the Wall Street Journal (7/13/10) passes off as fact, with no qualifier, the Israeli government's claim that members of IHH, a Turkish humanitarian organization, "attacked the Israeli soldiers as they boarded the ship."

While it's true that activists on board the Mavi Marmara tried to defend themselves against Israeli naval commandos and fought with the Israelis (War in Context, 6/6/10), the Journal’s framing of the incident gets what happened on board the ship backwards, implying that it was the activists who first started the clash.

Regardless of who initiated the violence on board the ship first--and witnesses claim that soldiers started shooting even before they landed on the Turkish ship (Common Dreams, 6/5/10)--when heavily armed commandos invade a ship in international waters without legal authorization to do so, that in itself constitutes an attack. The Israeli navy attacked the boat in international waters even as it was moving away from Gaza’s coast (Ali Abunimah, 6/7/10).

The Wall Street Journal’s reporting is the latest in a pattern of U.S. corporate media reporting the Israeli assault through Israel’s eyes (FAIR Media Advisory, 6/1/10). What Israel says goes, it seems--what actually happened during the flotilla raid is apparently of little interest.

FAIR has a new Action Alert (7/12/10) out about PBS airing a completely uncritical three-hour documentary about Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz--paid for by corporations with close ties to Shultz. You can leave copies of your messages to PBS, or comments on the alert, in the comment thread of this post.

Newsweek's right-wing Latin American correspondent Mac Margolis (7/2/10) is once again playing games with statistics. After the obligatory attack on Venezuela's Hugo Chavez as a "chest-thumping autocrat," Margolis gets down to the business of praising his favorite Latin American country, Colombia, as a country that deserves "lead billing" among the "new stars of the emerging markets":

In the past eight years, the Andean nation has gone from dud to dynamo: foreign investment has risen 250 percent. Its stock index is up 15 percent this year, and 35 percent (versus Brazil's 14 percent) over the decade.

Since Margolis makes the comparison between Colombia and Brazil, let's look at a more meaningful one: In 2000, per capita GDP in Colombia was $6,200, and Brazil's was $6,150 (figures adjusted for purchasing power). In 2009, the last year available, Colombia's was $8,200, and Brazil's was $9,400. So Brazilians, who started the century just slightly behind Colombia in economic output, are now 13 percent ahead--regardless of how well those nations' stock investors are doing.

On top of that, Colombia is "the only major country in Latin America in which the gap between rich and poor has increased in recent years," as the Washington Post's Juan Forero (4/19/10) reported, citing the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America. Twenty-three percent of Colombians live in extreme poverty, versus 7 percent of Brazilians, according to the UN.

It seems that Margolis picks his "duds" and "dynamos" based on ideology, not economics.

Octavia Nasr has been a Mideast correspondent for CNN for 20 years, and was their senior editor of Mideast affairs. Until yesterday.

On hearing of the death of a Hezbollah leader, she posted the following on her Twitter feed:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot.

This expression of sympathy offended some, who were outraged that a journalist would say anything like that about anyone associated with Hezbollah. Nasr explained in a follow-up on CNN's website:

I used the words "respect" and "sad" because to me, as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman's rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of "honor killing." He called the practice primitive and nonproductive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam.

This was interesting background--the kind of depth one might expect from a reporter with a few decades of experience in the region. But CNN decided that this was not good enough. An internal memo explained that CNN thinks "her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

Now it can't be that errant Twitter messages are the problem at CNN; they recently hired Erick Erickson as a commentator, even though he had called retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter a "goat-fucking child molester." And it can't be that CNN has a problem with opinionated journalists; after all, they spent several years defending Lou Dobbs' hateful, inaccurate anti-immigrant rants.

Nasr was not fired for anything she uttered on CNN's airwaves. And it's hard to imagine that Nasr has a "credibility" problem based on her message. CNN, on the other hand, does have one, since this decision seems to raise serious questions about exactly what sort of policy exists at the network to handles such  questions about "credibility."

Salon's Glenn Greenwald (7/8/10) notes that, oddly enough, there are an astonishing number of cases of people working in the  "liberal media" who got into hot water for being perceived as too far to the left.  It's hard to think of many examples of corporate media careers that were ended by being too far to the right.

UPDATE: The website of Time magazine (7/6/10)--which, like CNN, is owned by the Time Warner media conglomerate--features a column by ex-CIA officer Robert Baer about Fadlallah's passing. He calls him a "central figure in modern Middle Eastern history," and notes that the Reagan administration was wrong about his actual role within Hezbollah:

In the 1980s, Fadlallah was at the top of the Reagan administration's enemy list. The White House mistakenly believed he was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group the U.S. was at war with at the time.

And:

The problem is, there never has been a shred of evidence that Fadlallah was responsible for the Marine bombing, other than his preaching against foreign occupation. But in that sense, he was no different from Lebanon's other Muslim clerics who also did not want foreign troops in the country. Fadlallah was with near certainty not involved in Hezbollah's terrorist attacks in Lebanon. In fact, he complained privately about the Iranians--through their proxy, the Islamic Jihad Organization--taking hostages in his country, believing it was un-Islamic.

Baer's Nasr-esque conclusion should provoke considerable alarm, though:

But at the end of the day, he was an independent Arab voice, a Shi'a Muslim courageous enough to stand up against Iran. In that sense, we should regret his passing.

I understand the difference between a reporter (Nasr's former role) and a columnist (Baer's current gig at Time)--though a shorter version of Baer's column appeared as an obituary for Fadlallah on the Milestones page of Time's print edition (7/19/10).  So will Baer's column attract similar outrage? If not, why not?

At the top of his show last night (7/7/10), Bill O'Reilly notified viewers that the Factor had "investigated" how much crime in Arizona is committed by undocumented immigrants, explaining:  "What we found may surprise you."

"Telling the truth in the illegal immigration controversy, that is the subject of this evening's Talking Points Memo," O'Reilly began his commentary.

Now that would be a surprise, given that O'Reilly spent weeks drumming up hysteria about Arizona's soaring crime rate (crime has been dropping for years) and attributing this to the surge in immigrants (which would run contrary to the research documenting lower crime rates in areas with higher immigration populations).

O'Reilly played a clip of Arizona Rep. Trent Franks saying on another Fox News show, "About half of all of the violent crime in Maricopa County is committed by illegal immigrants."

So O'Reilly decided to check this out, and according to Maricopa County authorities,  they are "holding about 1,100 illegal aliens charged with committing violent crimes.... If the violent illegal aliens comprise about 15 percent of the total prison population in the county, they couldn't possibly commit 50 percent of the violent crime."

He concluded:

But the overall point here is that the truth must be told in the illegal immigration debate. And the congressman had it wrong. Overall, crime has dropped in many border counties because the recession has inhibited some illegal immigration. Fewer jobs, fewer illegal crossings.

Again, this flies in the face of what O'Reilly had been saying before. His support for the new Arizona anti-immigrant law was based on the alarming "crime wave" facing the state. Now he's saying there isn't one. But his explanation is still wrong-headed; crime has been declining for years in Arizona (along with many other big cities), so a recent drop in immigration due to the recession wouldn't explain anything.

O'Reilly seems to be saying that he was wrong (without, you know, saying so), but he's still hanging on to the idea that crime is down is because immigration has declined--which he has no way of proving. Perhaps because it isn't true.

Univision anchor Jose Ramos was the next guest on the show, and he poured more cold water on O'Reilly's theory:

RAMOS: Well, the problem is we keep on repeating misinformation. People are going to believe it.

O'REILLY: But I just gave you, actually, the latest factual information.

RAMOS: And I can give you three indisputable facts. First, crime is down in all the country.

O'REILLY: No, just the one I just told you.

RAMOS: Yes, according to -- I'll get to Arizona. According to the Department of Justice.

O'REILLY: And that's what I said.

RAMOS: Despite the fact that immigrant population has more than doubled in all the country. Second, American Majority Foundation found that in the states, including Arizona, with the largest immigrant population, crime has declined more than in other states.

And finally, this is important, according to the FBI--

O'REILLY: Yes.

RAMOS: --crime has gone down in Arizona. So are you going to argue with the FBI?

O'REILLY: I'm going to tell you this. I gave right in the Talking Points Memo the most accurate information available. And we got 1,100 people sitting in Maricopa County jail charged with violent felonies. 1,100. That's a catastrophe.

A pretty straightforward explanation, despite O'Reilly's interruptions and non sequiturs.

After Ramos left, O'Reilly complained to another guest  about Ramos' "theoretical nuttiness." He was apparently being serious.

Can we agree that calls for a government to violate international law are not a helpful contribution to the public debate? That's what the New York Times (7/6/10) offered when it published a call for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land in a letter from Richard Gertler of Teaneck, New Jersey.

Gertler argues against the "two-state solution" because it would lead to "the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty" and would amount to the "ethnic cleansing" of Jews living in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. He concludes by saying: "If the creation of a Palestinian state necessitates transfer of Jews from [the settlement of] Har Bracha in the West Bank, then the creation of the redefined Israel ought to necessitate the transfer of its Arab minority as well."

Israeli settlements in the West Bank, though, are built illegally on Palestinian land and violate the Fourth Geneva Conventions, which prohibit countries from transferring "parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies" (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions). On the other hand, Palestinian officials have indicated that Israeli settlers living on land that became a Palestinian state would be offered Palestinian citizenship if they were to stay there (Ha'aretz, 5/26/09).

Gertler's letter is nothing less than a call to kick out Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20 percent of the total population there. Palestinian citizens of Israel are the remnants of the indigenous Palestinian population that at one point were the overwhelming majority in historic Palestine until the 1947-49 wars that lead to the creation of Israel and resulted in the expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Palestinians from their land.

Gertler’s notion of a "two-state solution" is straight from the playbook of the far-right foreign minister of Israel, Avigdor Lieberman (Electronic Intifada, 6/29/10), who has in the past called for "loyalty" oaths that would strip Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship if they didn't pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/10/09).

Regard for free expression does not require the Times to publish calls for nations to commit war crimes, any more than the paper is obligated to provide a platform for those who see lynching or assassination as solutions to domestic problems. But when the proposed victims are Palestinian, corporate media seem to have a different standard (Extra! Update, 4/02).

Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC's This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show.  A completely uncontroversial comment from Bill Clinton, for instance, was determined to be "true," though no one would suggest that it wasn't. Defense Secretary Bob Gates' somewhat tendentious criticism of Wikileaks (for releasing a video of civilians being killed in Iraq by U.S. forces) was determined "Mostly True," though their reasoning was pretty unconvincing.

The right-wing Media Research Center has tallied up PolitiFact's scorecard so far, and they are pleased with the results:

After nearly three months, the results show far more Democrats and liberals earning a "False" rating, with most of the "True" ratings going to Republicans and conservatives. The discrepancy remains even if you take into account that about two-thirds of the evaluated statements came from Democrats in the first place.

From April 11 through June 20, PolitiFact has handed out seven "False" statements--six to Democrats/liberals, one to a Republican. During that same time, seven "True" labels were handed out--four for Republicans/conservatives, just two for Democrats (one, ironically, going to former President Bill Clinton). 

If I were a right-wing media critic, this couldn't be better news: According to a non-partisan study of one Sunday show, liberal and Democrats are more often telling whoppers.

Of course, this only points to the problems inherit in PolitiFact's approach. As FAIR noted in May, George Will has made claims that demand some sort of fact-checking--but the site, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to show much interest in evaluating the statements of one of the show's regular panelists.

As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out (7/5/10), during one of her This Week appearances  she declared that Halliburton had "defrauded the American taxpayer"--a comment that right-wing panelist Liz Cheney strongly (and unsurprisingly) found objectionable: "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on, but it's not facts." PolitiFact decided that this was worth a look. After a relatively thorough accounting of Halliburton's problems with overbilling and underperforming on its military contracts, they determined that Huffington's statement was "Half True." The reason? Apparently Huffington was not fair to the company, which may have merely overcharged the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars due to "waste and inefficiency."

L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (7/2/10), reviewing Oliver Stone's documentary South of the Border, remarks in passing that "a recent piece in the New York Times pointed out numerous errors" in the film's discussion of Latin American politics.

Turan might have noticed that the Times' supposed debunking, by former Latin American correspondent Larry Rohter, has itself been quite thoroughly debunked. But even more important when pointing out a filmmaker's "numerous errors" is to avoid making glaring errors of one's own, as Turan did when he recommended other documentaries similar to Stone's:

If you are interested in the fascinating events around [Hugo] Chavez's rise to power, you can see The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, directed by two Irish filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain, who were on the scene when the events happened.

And if you care about the groundbreaking election that brought [Evo] Morales to power in Ecuador...the film to watch is Rachel Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis, which shows how American political consultants tried in vain to get Morales' opponent into office.

The event Bartley and O'Briain were on hand to record, though, and the focus of their documentary, was the failed coup against Chavez in 2002--which took place more than three years after Chavez rose to power by being elected president.

And Morales is president of Bolivia, not Ecuador--and Our Brand Is Crisis doesn't depict him defeating a rival backed by U.S. consultants in the 2005 elections, it shows those U.S. consultants advising President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to victory in the 2002 elections.

In fictional film terms, Turan's review is like a critic saying that The Phantom Menace is inferior to The Empire Strikes Back, in which Yoda is revealed to be Han Solo's father.

Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (umm, PULITZER Prize-winning columnist) got a lot of feedback about her recent column ("Obama: Our First Female President," 6/30/10) suggesting that Barack Obama is kind of girly. She carefully pointed out that she was "not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises."

So he's girly-sounding, I guess. Parker elaborated by suggesting that Obama "displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way."

According to Parker's update column (7/4/10), many readers--including many black readers--did not think her assessment was particularly nice. Some pointed to the long history of emasculating black males; others commented on the problems Obama would face as a black politician if he were too appear too "angry."

Parker stands by her argument, though, and part of her response stressed one of the advantages of being white:

 But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African-Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

The failure to imagine how "people of other backgrounds" read your work is obvious enough. But the idea that being white means that you enjoy a unique ability to judge events "without the lens of race" is bizarre, unless you're trying to echo Stephen Colbert's long-running gag about white people who cannot possibly see race. As he explained once to Al Sharpton, Colbert was going to take Sharpton at his word when he said he was black, because Colbert was beyond race.   

Well, Parker is apparently doing precisely that: 

You'll have to take me at my word when I say that I don't view Obama exclusively as a black man--no matter what he said on his census form. Not only is he half-white, but also he has managed to transcend skin color, at least from where I sit.

Parker will soon co-host a show on CNN--not Comedy Central--by the way.

There's been an awful lot written about the Washington Post and David Weigel. The short version of the story: Weigel was hired by the Post to do blogging/Internet reporting on the conservative movement. This bothered some on the right, since Weigel's left-libertarian politics made them think he was out to get them.  

Weigel evidently had strong opinions about some of the people in that movement; when some of his messages to a liberal-leaning email list were leaked, his time at the Post was over.

David Carr at the New York Times wrote a thoughtful column (7/4/10) about the Weigel controversy, noting that Weigel "probably could have survived if he had slammed Rachel Maddow or had some fun at Al Franken's expense."

Carr adds that "if you dumped every reporter who ever sent a snide message or talked smack in private, there would be nothing but crickets chirping in newsrooms all over America." Weigel was hired precisely because he had strong opinions and could also produce interesting, substantive reporting; the Post seems to think the problems with the former mean they must live without the latter.

After quoting Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli saying, "We can’t have any tolerance for the perception that people are conflicted or bring a bias to their work," Carr proposes "a little thought experiment":

What if a reporter made a wildly inappropriate video suggesting that the secretary of state, who happens to be a woman, should drink Mad Bitch beer? Surely that reporter would be forced to apologize to Hillary Rodham Clinton before walking the plank. Yet when this happened, Dana Milbank, the longtime Washington Post star who made the video, remained a prized political writer at the paper. (The "Mouthpiece Theater" video segments, mercifully, have been canceled.)

 Indeed, one can recall that the lesson Dana Milbank drew from the Mad Bitch fiasco was that other people on the internet are mean-spirited.