by Keith Olbermann
Fri Jun 27, 2008 at 03:58:58 PM PDT
Every once in awhile I see mass media blasted for being inattentive or sloppy or exhibiting a pack mentality (or exhibiting no mentality at all), and I recoil, just as you might if somebody trashed the entirety of your field.
And then something happens that makes me think the criticism isn't merely justified - it's understated.
Did anybody notice that Grover Norquist walked into the Washington bureau of The Los Angeles Times yesterday and dismissed Obama as "John Kerry with a tan?"
For part of the afternoon, I thought the lack of explosions in the distance owed to the fact that
this had only been posted earlier today.
Silly me.
Mr. Norquist's simple slam-dunk five-word dive into the deep end of the racism pool was actually posted Thursday afternoon. There's no indication that the Times even put it in the print edition today.
In fact, researching tonight's segment on this for the show I found only about half a dozen references to it on sites belonging to the larger news organizations. And even that's being generous: we have something on it at our site, so does Jake Tapper at ABC (not that it appeared in World News or anything), and after that, the biggest name running with it appears to be Radar.
Am I missing something here?
I know this literal reference to the color of a man's skin may not be new (it appears, with equal dismissiveness, in some chat rooms as long ago as last November, and Anna Marie Cox had a line about Mitt Romney being "John Kerry with a tan" early this year), but it's not like Grover Norquist is some memory from the antique Republican past.
McCain still sends reps to this guy's organization, our staff is told by Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, who joins me on the subject.
Can you really say this about an African-American candidate and not only not get any grief for it, but not get any coverage?