CNN is fighting the perception of being biased against racist thugs

CNN is fighting the perception of being biased against racist thugs

by digby

Greg Sargent reports on the bizarre fact that CNN is refusing to do any real reporting on the racial incident at the RNC yesterday involving one of its employees:

As you’ve surely heard by now, two GOP convention attendees were ejected from the festivities last night after throwing nuts at a black CNN camera-woman. The words “this is how we feed animals” were uttered.The incident was first tweeted by David Shuster and confirmed by TPM. The GOP put out a statement condemning the incident as “deplorable,” which is good. CNN put out its own terse statement last night confirming the bare minimum about the affair.

But as my Post colleague Erik Wemple noted last night, the question is whether CNN, which presumably knows all the details about the incident, will treat this as a news story, and report in full detail what happened.The answer, so far, appears to be No. CNN has since posted a brief item on the incident, but here’s what it does not tell you: The identity of the target of the nut attack or of the alleged nut hurlers. Whoever wrote the CNN item did not say whether it made any attempt to interview the target — or to identify the nut throwers.

As Greg goes on to point out, this is likely because CNN is afraid of appearing biased and it doesn’t want to be part of the story. And this is despite the context of Romney campaign’s Jesse helms level welfare strategy and vote suppression effort.

It is an act of cowardice on their part brought about, I presume, by the Republican hissy fits during the primary campaign against any news network that dared to bring up race. That sort of playing the refs has always been very successful — they’re so aggressive and hostile that it makes normal people naturally recoil. But CNN is a professional news network. If they won’t even tell a story about some Republican cretins who launched a racial attack on one of their own employees, they’re pretty worthless.

They probably would have cut to commercial when Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by Richard Daley’s goons at the 1968 Democratic convention. I certainly don’t think you’d hear Wolf Blitzer say, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, Dan,” as Walter Cronkite did. That would be biased against the thugs.

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