The unconscious racism of a San Francisco liberal newspaper reporter
Bookworm on Mar 15 2010 at 5:23 pm | Filed under: Media matters
Last week, I did a post about the news stories that followed in the wake of the conservative Groupa-Palooza gathering the heart of liberal Marin County. I focused especially on one San Francisco Chronicle reporter who was shocked by a shirt one of the attendees was wearing:
Regarding that last, let me add a few words about the SF Chronicle’s coverage. First,the Chron said the Tea Partiers are “ultra-conservative.” I find that an interesting characterization because it’s meaningless. To Progressives and liberals and Democrats and whatever else they’re calling themselves nowadays, there is no such thing as a “conservative.” Or rather, a conservative is someone who says “I’m a Republican, but I agree entirely with the Democrats.” All true conservatives, meaning people who believe in small government and American exceptionalism are tarred by the “ultra-conservative” brush.
Second of all, regarding the MSM’s inevitable efforts to tar the Tea Partiers as racist, get a load of this peculiar paragraph:
Bay Area Patriots describes itself as nonpartisan. But most of the visible campaign activity on Sunday was on behalf of Republicans. There were also a few Libertarian and American Independent candidates – one of whom, Jerry Leidecker, an American Independent running for Congress, wore a shirt showing President Obama with what appeared to be watermelon juice on his lips.
Asked about the apparent racial reference, Leidecker turned around to show a caricature of former President George W. Bush on the back of the shirt, labeled, “Fascist.”
I’ll give the reporter a smidgen of credit for allowing Leidecker to show both sides of his t-shirt, but I have one question for you: What does watermelon juice look like? Unless the reporter added that watermelon seeds were dribbling down along with the painted juice on Obama’s painted lips (which he didn’t say), how do you distinguish painted watermelon juice from any other type of liquid? To a hammer, everything is a nail; and to a liberal, any attack on Obama is racist.
I’m now in a position to give you more information about that suspect shirt with the watermelon-bedecked Obama, cause there are some great photographs, here. He even took photos of Jerry Leidecker’s shirt. You might recognize the image of Barack Obama on that shirt:
Yup — it’s the infamous Barack Obama as the Joker image, the one that every even marginally cognizant American knew about. Yet here is a newspaper reporter who looks at that picture, a picture that riffs on a Hollywood pop culture image of a guy smeared with lipstick, and he pronounces that it’s a picture of Obama “with what appeared to be watermelon juice on his lips.”
I’m try to come up with a suitably scathing statement about a reporter who is so miserably informed about the world around him, and so biased, but I can’t. I’m just beyond words. Maybe that ignorance itself shouldn’t surprise me so much, though. It turns out that vast numbers of reporters are miserably uninformed about American iconography. And yet we trust these people to filter our complex world and given honest, comprehensible information about what they know.
Related posts:
- Even a reluctant local media had to admit that Marin conservative gathering was civilized
- The racism Rorschach test, or caught between Scylla & Charybdis
- Life in liberal-land *UPDATED*
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12 Responses to “The unconscious racism of a San Francisco liberal newspaper reporter”
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Only people like dreamweaver are under the impression that they have a realistic analysis of the world from such sources.
The media oligarchy of elites are disconnected from the people they have power over. As with all oligarchies and power mad groups, the disassociation from the consequences of their power inevitably makes them more disconnected from the people their power affects.
Typical. The reporter, Bob Egelko, is an idiot. It’s not just about being misinformed, it’s about the willingness to stay misinformed. This ideologue collects a paycheck despite his idiocy, and in most aspects because of it.
The San Francisco Chronicle is a running joke. Good riddance to that rag. The sad fact is that when this newspaper closes shop it’s admirers will simply move to more radical sources. Lost causes, one an all.
The San Francisco Chronicle has several good things going for it:
Zits
Luann
Miss Manners (on Monday)
Dear Abby
Mick LaSalle
Tha-tha-tha-tha-tha-that’s all.
Now let’s be open minded about this.
Maybe the Joker is a character who really likes fresh watermelon and we all missed it.
Nah.
The juice would be blood before it would be fruit.
“… a reporter who is so miserably informed…”
You’re too charitable. I’d say “so blatently dishonest”.
“the Tea Partiers are ‘ultra-conservative’.”
In addition to the chronic dishonesty of so many liberals, there is also the fact that from their point of view they are the political middle, which means that communists are only a little to their left but real conservatives are far to their right.
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Watermelon juice? From the NObama-as-Joker poster? Does the Chronicle hire its reporters out of the Mission Street Day Laborers for a Bottle of Booze Brigade? Though that would insult some of the winos, as it would not be difficult to find some who are more informed on current events than that ignoramus posing as a journalist. That journalist probably thinks that “Who ? What? Where? How? Why? When?” is a cheerleading chant for middle school basketball games.
The irony about the NObama-as-Joker poster is that its creator is someone who, by the libs’ definition of racism, is incapable of racism, as he is a left-leaning Palestinian-American. According to the libs, the creator of the poster is not racist, but those who use the poster are racist. Interesting.
Bored during his winter school break, Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama with the recognizable clown makeup using Adobe’s Photoshop software….
“After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,”Alkhateeb said. “From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.”
“I abstained from voting in November,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state.” If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.
How delicious: Kucinich, likely the most liberal of presidential candidates last year!
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/08/18/obama-joker-poster-artist-exposed-liberal-leaning-palestinian
“Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama “Hope” artist about “socialism” being the wrong caption for the Joker image. “It really doesn’t make any sense to me at all,” he said. “To accuse him of being a socialist is really … immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?”"
So essentially Alky here knows it is true that Obama is the poster boy of socialism but thinks denying the charge will help convince people socialism is a good thing.
Obviously socialism hasn’t been tried right by Obama, that’s why he was failing, eh.
If you know Bob Egelko, you are not surprised in the slightest by his assessment.
The SF Chronicle is known for its left-wing advocacy journalists (Joe Garofoli, Carla Marinucci, Marissa Lagos, Tyche Hendricks, etc, etc, etc) but Egelko stands out as the most hard left of all. I have no evidence that he is a card-carrying member, but even a cursory look at Egelko’s work exposes him as – at the very least – a hard leftist, if not an out-and-out Communist.
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