Posted on 08/03/2008 11:07:37 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
Exactly how wide is the gulf between elite media opinion and public opinion on matters of politics?
Let’s put it this way, after Sen. Barack Obama falsely accused Sen. John McCain of saying he (Obama) doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency and has a funny name, Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC, called Obama's "Dollar Bill" statement "self-deprecating":
ANDREA MITCHELL: I have to tell you that the people who heard Barack Obama say what he said Wednesday night—and it's very similar to things he's said in Paris and Berlin and a lot of other stops—it's very self-deprecating. He says "I don't look like other people who have been President of the United States," most people who watched that, I don't know very many people who've watched that, and the people in the audience, the reporters, have never interpreted it, have never inferred from that, that he is making some kind of racial statement, but that's the way the McCain camp says that they took it, and Rick Davis by putting it out there, sure –
Sen. Obama, echoing Mitchell's talking points, himself made the same observation during his Saturday morning press conference:
SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Most of the people here were at this event in Union, Missouri. Almost none of you, maybe none of you, thought that I was making a racially incendiary remark for playing the race card. …
So we’re clear: According to Andrea Mitchell and Sen. Obama himself, no one in the journalist class heard Sen. Obama’s remarks about his looks and name to be a reference to his race.
There can be no doubt that this lopsided view within elite media has colored the coverage. Here’s how CNN’s Wolf Blitzer kicked off a panel discussion last Thursday:
WOLF BLITZER: It doesn't get more poisonous or explosive than to inject this whole issue of race, especially when you have obviously the first African-American on a major ticket. So what's the strategy behind the McCain campaign right now?
Meanwhile, on a Sunday morning panel, Blitzer gave credence to the idea that the McCain campaign’s Britney-Paris-Obama ad was racial in tone:
WOLF BLITZER: All right. Images are very important, and there's been several comments in recent days, our own Donna Brazill made the suggestion here in "The Situation Room" the other day and Bob Herbert a columnist for "New York Times" wrote this, referring to this ad. Referring to the blonde and the Harold Jr. ad when he was running for senator in Tennessee. That's a very serious charge that's been leveled against the McCain campaign right now saying that what the McCain campaign did this week was similar to what Republicans did against Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee when he was running for the senate …
According to the media consensus, then, Sen. Obama was not playing the race card when he wrongly accused Sen. McCain of commenting on his looks but Sen. McCain’s campaign was playing the race card when he compared Barack Obama to mindless celebrities.
This morning pollster Scott Rasmussen provides for us a snapshot of regular peoples’ views on the controversy. And it isn’t at all in line with the elite media’s view. According to Rasmussen:
Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.
However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.
To recap: Zero journalists interpreted Sen. Obama’s remarks as racist. Fifty-three percent of the general public did.
They act as if telling the truth about this cynical euro-marxist race baiter threatens their children's lives.
The American people are not so dim as the pundits seem to believe however, and know racism when they hear it. Obama has little to gain and much to lose by trying his authoritarian racial intimidation on a free people.
Comparing a Black man to quite possible the two dumbest blonds on the face of the earth has to be racist,
I would like $50 Million dollars in Government funding to study this question for the next 8 to 10 years in all 60 states or the lower 57 without going to the One Obama keeps missing and the two his staff won’t let him visit....
Holy Moly sofaman, that is quite the background!
My dad grew up in Buffalo were the Polish neighborhood was next to the black neighborhood and he mentioned that the black youngsters would learn to speak some Polish so they could play baseball together..
As for the Ad, it is just funny, that is the way I took it, and apparently the way the large majority of America took it, so all of the handwringing in the press means nothing..
As usual.
Nah. They'll just conclude that we voters all have rocks in our heads.
Freepers have know for a long time that the MSM is firmly in the Obama (Democrat) camp and will do everything in their power to put him in the best light. Any intelligent person who is not an ideologue can recognize that Obama is an empty suit. He has a good speaking voice and reads a fully prepared speech well but there is no substance at all to him. If he were white he would have been thrown under the bus a long time ago. The MSM also knows this but they will not report on it. They are covering for him. MSNBC and CNN are pathetic. I agree with the earlier post that they really aren’t news outlets any longer. They are propaganda engines for the liberal/left.
The bias is so blatant that they don’t even try to hide it. The real question we have is will the knuckle dragging public catch on to the wool being pulled over their eyes. Or have we been so dumbed down through the public (government) schools, the MSM, Hollywood, etc that we cannot see the truth. More people are waking up to this fraud. This is in part thanks to talk radio and the Internet. Hopefully enough of the American public will wake up so we can avoid an utter catastrophe.
The Joker must have been Andrea Mitchell’s first husband..somebody sure put a knife to her to get that smile.
From now on somebody post a picture of the Joker whenever her name comes up. I don’t have one, but just saw the movie.
Not a chance. The media will instead conclude that we are irredeemably racist.
I suppose all the times he said "...and oh, by the way, he's black" in the exact same context, that wasn't racial either?
I think there is also a generational gap here. People under 35 or so who have grown up with a much more heightened culture of celebrity, internet, and the like “get” the ad because it is a send up of CELEBRITY CULTURE and the media itself.
I noticed that Brazille and Gergen on ABC brought up Race, and Jake Tapper didn’t see it, and his friends didn’t see race in the ad.
That sound like a hot combo of genetics you got going on. : )
Btw, I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. Left SA when I was 27. My grandparents are from Lithuania and Poland, having left in the 20's. So this African_American thing drives me up a wall. Why aren't we all just proud to be Americans? Why divide ourselves, racially?
My grandparents left 2 religiously divided countries. I lived in a racially divided country. Neither are anything to aspire to.
JMO none of the tv media fall under unbiased reporting.
The Obamao claims to be post racial, but the proof is in the pudding.
I know many of you like our family get the Oh~Dramas campaign trail emails.
This last on was so whiney regarding the Brit/Paris stuff and McCain has gone to far hurting my feelings crap that we could not even read it to the end.
First Americans were bitter and clinging to their religion and guns, now they won’t accept anyone who doesn’t look like *the guy on the money* for president ... if a Republican had stepped into these two big potholes of condescension, his campaign would never have survived through the night.
So basically 22% of all Americans think that anything a white man says about a black man is racist! Nice!
WFT???< sic >
BULLSTALIN.
Obama was claiming that McCain's campaign and his supporters were SAYING that Obama doesn't "look" like the presidents on the dollar bills.
It was a racist remark calling all of his critics racists.
There IS no other spin. Self-depricating? Hardly.
The ONLY ties that Obama has to being able to claim American in his ancestory is in the white mother who abandoned him and the white grandparents who raised him who he has called racists and absolutely shunned.
He’s a Jakarta street kid who’s conning his way to the White House.
Say it isn't so.
I think what we are eeing is Obama’s inner white bigot coming out to play...
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