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February 05, 2010
 By
Popular Request: More On Soledad O’Brien—This Year’s VDWIRA
Winner
By Joe
Guzzardi
Normally, after I wrap up several weeks
worth of research that leads up to my naming the annual
VDARE.COM Worst
Immigration Reporter Award [VDWIRA], I turn completely away from the
subject of rotten journalism.
During the year, as I read immigration
stories and columns, I look for repeat offenders and make a file
from which my finalists will be chosen.
Then, long about December, I’ll review and
evaluate them for awfulness.
Once I make my choice, I’m done. I’ve had
enough. Ask yourself if you would be willing to reread 50
Nina Bernstein New
York Times
immigration stories within the same two week period.
But something about this year’s winner,
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, interested readers so much that I
couldn’t help going back to investigate her Worst Immigration
Reporter credentials further.
Prompted by
Nicholas
Stix’s blog that addressed more O’Brien hypocrisy, I asked
myself: is it possible that she fools her entire audience?
Is O’Brien only pulling the wool over the eyes of her gullible
media peers—or has she
conned
everyone?
After all, O’Brien is a self-proclaimed
Hispanic who doesn’t speak Spanish, a self-labeled black who
looks white—and a so-called Irishwoman who only identifies
herself as Irish to get laughs when she’s introduced at one of
the meaningless award ceremonies she is forever attending.
As far as I could find, O’Brien never goes
to the
St.
Patrick’s Day Parade. She’s never been honored as
Grand Marshall. (Yet!).
It struck me odd because, although my
roots are
Sicilian, I never missed the St. Patrick’s Day parade when I
lived in New York.
Looking back on my
Manhattan
salad days, I recall with great fondness that I owned two
Irish Setters and St. Patrick’s Day was an annual highlight
for me. I took Paddy and Cassidy to the saloons that lined 86th
Street. Because of them, I drank free while they noshed on
slivers of corned beef.
But O’Brien, apparently, isn’t interested
in these festivities. She’s too busy praising illegal aliens and
tooting her own horn.
Given O’Brien’s half-baked and dubious
credentials, I would expect ethnic identity groups to reject her
as a pariah. Yet the National Association of Black Journalists
and the
National Association of Hispanic Journalists list O’Brien as
their member while others heap kudos on her.
Because of the corrupt nature of
journalism, I’m not surprised that these organizations embrace
O’Brien.
However, I’m happy to report that real
people are less accepting of her.
Based on feedback from O’Brien’s
superficial documentary
Black in America, I’d say she has disgusted a significant
percentage mainstream African Americans.
Addressing O’Brien’s claim that she’s
black, “Black Snob”,
a blogger on one webzine, zimbio.com, began its criticism by
announcing: “She
needs to quit.”
Black Snob
was not urging O’Brien to leave
CNN but to quit
calling herself black.
She picked up on something that jumped out at me when I
reviewed O’Brien’s
YouTube
videos:
“I have watched her with (African Americans) before and never once did
she refer to (African Americans) in the first person, as in 'I'
or 'We,' or 'we as a people,' etc”
Black Snob noted that there’s a prevailing
hostility towards O’Brien for flip-flopping on her
"black status" and
accused her, properly, of race opportunism.
Another blog,
Aunt Jemima’s
Revenge, headlined its review of
Black in America with
this title:
“F*** Soledad O’Brien”
“CNN reporter Soledad O'Brien should have her sisterhood card revoked
immediately and never returned! She has damaged, betrayed, and
disrespected the entire black female community with her
negative, short-sighted, half-assed, stereotypical, and
repetitive ‘investigative reporting’ on black women in America.
“Her program Black In America: The
Black Woman And The Family is a complete and total fraud!
This program did not address the lives and
experiences of black women in America at all!
It was two hours of the same negative racist and sexist
stereotypes that the majority of white
America
believes about black people, particularly black women.”
Comments to
Aunt Jemima’s Revenge
from blacks included:
“In my blog I referred to this special as ‘Why You Should Hate Black
Women and Their Children.’ If I had the choice of black women
being completely ignored by the mainstream news or investigative
reports like CNN or MSNBC, I would much rather have black women
in America completely ignored.”
Another:
“What I love is the fact that CNN and other news sources paint O’Brien
as an iconic black women who ‘knows what it’s like’. At the same
time, she’s the ‘Groundbreaking
Latina of the Year’
in Catalina Magazine.
Well, which one is it, Maria de la Soledad O’Brien? Judging from her full name,
you’d guess she speaks Spanish. Guess again. And how many black
folks in this country are 50 percent Irish? Give me a break.
O’Brien doesn’t know what she’s reporting about. Sit the hell
down and let a real black American do the talking.”
Blacks who support O’Brien are rare.
Eventually, I
discovered two:
Reverend
Al Sharpton and California U.S. Rep.
Maxine
Waters. The occasion was one of the hundreds of incestuous
Journalism Awards dinners, this time the 2009 Black News Annual
Dinner.
That’s rich! Sharpton is
America’s
biggest race baiter. And Waters is a member in good standing
of the Congressional Black Caucus that taken as a whole works to
subvert American workers by promoting Open Borders. Because of
Waters’ neglect of immigration enforcement, her 35th
Congressional District, once solidly black, is now majority
illegal
alien Hispanic.
If
CNN wants a black anchor, why does it use a sometimes-only
black reporter like O’Brien who offends African Americans and
whites as well? The network has legitimate blacks like
Don Lemon and
Joe Johns.
For that matter, why did
CNN fire
Bernard Shaw?
A U.S. Marine from 1959-1963 and a political centrist, Shaw’s
most famous moment came in 1988 when he grilled presidential
candidate
Michael Dukakis about his
anti-death penalty stance. Analysts pointed to Dukakis’
evasive answer as the reason that George H.W. Bush won the
election.
Back in 1988, of course,
CNN was still a
respectable network with rising in viewership. Shaw with his
serious, straight forward demeanor made
CNN successful.
Today,
CNN’s ratings have
dropped. O’Brien’s dishonest
Black in America led
to the
dismal failure of
Latino in America, in which where she sympathetically
profiled
pregnant Hispanic teens, obese Latino-American children, and
so-called immigrant “hate
crime” victims.
A VDARE.COM Puerto Rican reader,
Augusto
Perez, summed O’Brien up by calling her journalism
“intentionally
misrepresentative.”
CNN executives want to know why network has
fallen so far? They should be locked in a room and forced to
watch uninterrupted hours of immigration cheerleader Soledad
O’Brien.
Joe Guzzardi
[email
him] is a California native
who recently fled the state because of over-immigration,
over-population and a rapidly deteriorating quality of life. He
has moved to Pittsburgh, PA where the air is clean and the
growth rate stable. A
long-time instructor in English at the Lodi Adult School,
Guzzardi has been writing a weekly column since 1988. It
currently appears in the
Lodi News-Sentinel. |
