Tuesday, February 03, 2009

About race

There were a couple of interesting stories about race over the last few weks. The first is Janet Albrechtsen with her reverse racism. She as made it her personal crusade to get everyone to focus on Obama as not black, but the President. She could be Martin Luther King "let not a man be judged by the clour of his skin, but by the character of his heart" (see below)

She has a swing at the media in general;

But when opinion leaks into news coverage and straight analysis, as so often happens, something altogether more dangerous is happening. The media forfeits their place as the fourth estate when they forget their primary duty to report the facts so the average reader, as well the commentariat, can form their own judgments.

Regrettably, much of the mainstream media in the Western world have abandoned this trusted role. They want to be players, not mere observers. Intellectual scepticism, which should sit at the heart of good political analysis, is too often a rarity in an increasingly liberal (in the American sense of that word) media.


Indeed, for Odrama to present himself in this way as Lincoln’s heir hints at the sort of hubris that usually sets in only towards the end of a presidency. To do so at a time in his career when he still has no executive track record of any kind and precious few achievements as a legislator suggests a vast presumptuousness.

But this has gone largely unremarked. For much of the media, the cocktail of colour, left-wing politics and grand rhetoric is enough to secure him immortal presidential greatness, whether or not he achieves anything.


All of which seems to imply her belief that Obama will prove to be an ephemera. One does wonder if anyone is paying much attention to exactly what a basket case has been left in the US by thirty years (including Clinton) of effectively conservative Government.

Meanwhile a more rational conservative took aim at an anti-semitic rant that had leached its way into the business section of The Age. I don't rightly know how to place Michael Ronaldson yet, but this piece was a good statement about the standards one might hold writers to.

But the headline "Broadsheet no place for narrow minds" could really apply to Janet A.

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