US elections: Fox forced to apologise to Obama for third time in two weeks

Ewen MacAskill in Washington
guardian.co.uk,
Friday June 13 2008
Article history

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News television station has been forced to apologise to Barack Obama for the third time in a fortnight after screening a racially tinged caption referring to his wife Michelle as his "baby mama".

Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming at Fox, said in a statement on Thursday that a producer "exercised poor judgment" during the segment.

The statement came as Obama established a website to help counter what he referred to as smears and rumours.

One of his first moves was to defend Michelle by debunking a persistent rumour that there is a video showing her speaking from the pulpit of the Trinity church in Chicago in which she allegedly refers to whites as "whitey". He said she had never spoken at Trinity or used such a phrase.

Republicans see her as vulnerable because she is more inclined than Obama to make off-the-cuff remarks. Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, rejected this in an interview with MSNBC yesterday, describing her as an "asset to the campaign".

Fox, seen by liberals as a cheerleader for the Republican party, carried an interview this week with the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin about whether Michelle Obama was being unfairly targeted.

During the interview, a caption was flashed up saying: "Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama's baby mama." The term is slang for a woman who has a baby with a man who is neither her partner nor boyfriend.

The apology comes just over a week after one of Fox's anchormen expressed regret for a comment on the night that Obama won the Democratic nomination. Obama, in a show of affection, lightly touched his fist against Michelle's and the anchorwoman referred to it as a "terrorist fist jab". Previously, a Fox contributor Liz Trotta had to apologise after making a joke about Obama being assassinated.

The trio of apologies is embarrassing for Fox. Murdoch last month praised Obama but stopped short of endorsing him, though his New York Post came out for Obama in January.

quinta-feira, 12 de junho de 2008

Baby's daddy vs. Baby mama

I've read Eats, Shoots and Leaves so I know what a difference a comma or apostrophe can make, but this is almost as "ludikrus" as some people doing the fist bump (they know who they are).

June 12, 2008, 9:31 am
New York Times Opinionator blog
Was it a slur?
By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: Barack Obama, michelle obama

Salon’s Alex Koppelman, tipped off by a reader, reports that on Fox News yesterday, “during a segment discussing conservative attacks against Michelle Obama, the wife of presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, the network described the former as ‘Obama’s baby mama.’ ” (Koppelman has the video clip of the controversial chyron on his blog.)

For Koppelman’s colleague Joan Walsh, this raises some questions:

“Where do you even start when criticizing Fox’s slur? Do you try to explain that ‘baby mama’ is slang for the unmarried mother of a man’s child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend? Are they racist, or just clueless? Isn’t there racism even in their cluelessness, if somebody didn’t know what “baby mama” means, but used it anyway? Even at Fox, won’t somebody have to apologize? Am I wasting my time even thinking about that?”

Michelle Malkin, who was the featured guest on the Fox report in question, answers that last query in the affirmative.

I did not write the caption and I was not aware of it when it ran (the Baltimore studio doesn’t have a monitor). I don’t know if the caption writer was making a lame attempt to be hip, clueless about the original etymology of the phrase, or both. But I do know that it was Michelle Obama herself who referred to Barack as her “baby’s daddy” and has used the phrase “baby daddy” to describe Barack while on the stump this year.

Here’s how she introduced him during his Senate victory speech on Nov. 2, 2004:

MICHELLE OBAMA, WIFE OF BARACK OBAMA: My baby’s daddy Barack Obama. Yeah!

Apples and oranges? The Opinionator reports, you decide …

By the way, Michelle Obama was probably saying "My babies' daddy" - in the plural - since the Obamas have two daughters.

Quotes

“When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this country who don’t really think that all paths are open to them, who will believe they can be anything they want to be. And I think the world will look at America a little differently.” - Barack Obama, 2006
"I didn't come here to debate the past. I came here to deal with the future ... We must learn from history. But we can't be trapped by it." - Barack Obama, Summit of the Americas 2009
“To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. This is our moment. This is our time.” - Barack Obama
"Sasha and Malia, I love you both more than you can imagine, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House." - Barack Obama
"'I think people will see that I'm not afraid to have folks around me who complement my strengths and who are independent. I'm not a believer in a government of yes-men. I think one of the failures of the early Bush Administration was being surrounded by people who were unwilling to deliver bad news, or who were prone to simply feed the president information that confirmed his own preconceptions." - Barack Obama
"I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation - the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election." - Barack Obama
"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Electing a black president says around the world that you can overcome old wounds. I’ve said in our case, We have a birth defect, but it can be overcome." - Condoleezza Rice
“Look what we did. Look what we did. He’s won. It’s over.” - Colin Powell
"Things do change. There is a God. They do get better." - David Dinkins
“I think that Senator Obama brings a fresh set of eyes, fresh set of ideas to the table. I think that Senator McCain, as gifted as he is, is essentially going to execute the Republican agenda, the orthodoxy of the Republican agenda with a new face and a maverick approach to it, and he’d be quite good at it, but I think we need more than that.” - Colin Powell (endorsing Obama on 19/10/08)
"I will vote for the individual I think that brings the best set of tools to the problems of 21st-century America and the 21st-century world regardless of party, regardless of anything else other than the most qualified candidate." - Colin Powell
"The United States of America is an extraordinary country. It is a country that has overcome many, many, now years, decades, actually a couple of centuries, of trying to make good on its principles. And I think what we are seeing is an extraordinary expression of the fact that 'We the People' is beginning to mean all of us." - Condoleezza Rice
"[Obama] is running for president of all Americans, not just African-Americans. [We] must be careful not to segregate Senator Obama and impose some litmus test that is unfair and unproductive." - Rev. Al Sharpton
"Welcome to the murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure. As Obama gently put it in his race speech, today's racial 'resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company.' However, they can be — and possibly will be — expressed in the privacy of the voting booth." - Charles M. Blow
"Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you're going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them. And Barack and I set out to build lives guided by these values and pass them on to the next generation, because we want our children and all children in this nation to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams and your willingness to work for them." - Michelle Obama

sábado, 14 de junho de 2008

"Baby Mama" was appalling but "terrorist fist jab" goes beyond the pale

US elections: Fox forced to apologise to Obama for third time in two weeks

quinta-feira, 12 de junho de 2008

Baby's daddy vs. Baby mama

President Obama: The View from Brazil

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