Why the media’s coverage of the Melissa Harris-Perry controversy wrongfully made her into a villain.
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“We’re genuinely appreciative of everyone who offered serious criticisms of last Sunday’s program, and I am reminded that our fiercest critics can sometimes be our best teachers.” – MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry, 1/4/14
Remember when Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, launched into that racist tirade where he made allusions to lynchings because of a few hecklers in the crowd? And how Richards made an apology and tried to make it seem like it was all just a bad joke? How it was news for a few weeks and then Michael Richards disappeared for a while before coming back? If you’ve paid attention to the Melissa Harris-Perry controversy the past few weeks, you’d begin to see some similarities between these two drastically different situations.
On Saturday, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry apologized for a segment in one of her shows that has come under fire by a handful of conservatives on Twitter and CNN. As Dylan Byers noted last week on Politico, CNN is really, really pissed off about the controversy, even making the case that some people are calling for her firing. The segment? Harris-Perry and her panel, including a comedian who regularly contributes to CNN (Dean Obeidallah) and an actress (Pia Glenn) made some off-color jokes about the “diversity” in Mitt Romney’s family, alluding to Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson Kieran.
Now, whether or not this is CNN attempting to attack an opposing network while it’s down, or CNN trying to boost its image as moderate or non-biased, the coverage of this minor incident by CNN, among others, has been borderline unbelievable. Want evidence of that? On Monday, Ann Coulter called Harris-Perry MSNBC’s “token African-American.” As of 11 AM on Tuesday, the Coulter comment hasn’t even warranted a website post from CNN, proving once and for all that if you say enough incredibly stupid and hateful things, eventually no one cares about them anymore.
What Harris-Perry said isn’t on the radar even among cringe-worthy things MSNBC hosts have said in the past few months: Alec Baldwin slung a homosexual slur at a photographer that cost him his job, Martin Bashir said, in no uncertain terms, that someone should defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth, which prompted his resignation, and Chris Matthews suggested that Chris Christie crushes his wife during sex, after which… no one said anything, because people have come to expect this kind of hard-hitting commentary from Chris Matthews.
Harris-Perry’s segment was not on par with any of this. And although I disagree with Brittney Cooper of Salon that Harris-Perry and her guests were asking a legitimate question of “What it means to be a black kid in a white family” – in my opinion, it was just an attempt at being funny in the age of The Daily Show – she hits the nail on the head at the end of her column about the controversy:
“This is just one more way that white supremacy wins. It exhausts people of color in battles over offenses that are in no way equal. It makes the mere perception of threat among whites equal to actual political threats to black welfare. Then, to add insult to injury, our mistakes cost us more. What costs white folks a slap on the wrist, or more often a mildly disapproving look, generally costs us a pound of flesh and more than an ounce of dignity.
“Despite the injustice of it all, Melissa Harris-Perry refused to play small. She owned her ‘mistakes’ without qualification, modeled what real apologies look like, and elevated our level of public discourse in the process. In a world hellbent on disciplining uppity Negresses and stripping black folks of dignity by demanding our obsequity, she remains a class act.”
When the media covers “controversies” like this as though they’re actual crimes deserving of dismissal, and maintains the idea of false equivalency when it comes to racism, it makes a mockery of what news organizations are supposed to accomplish. The fact is that what Melissa Harris-Perry and her guests said doesn’t hold a candle to what Caucasians in the media get away with on a regular basis. And as for CNN and the other outlets that harped on this non-story, the persistent media catalyst in making a bad joke a “story,” please pray to whatever higher power you believe in that they aren’t the “teachers” that Melissa Harris-Perry is learning from.
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–Photo: therachelmaddowshow/Flickr