A chyron shame

From "The Caucus" at the NYT:

Fox Forced to Address Michelle Obama Headline
By Jim Rutenberg

For the third time in less than three weeks, Fox News Channel has had to acknowledge using poor judgment through inappropriate references to Senator Barack Obama.

The network has released a statement saying it should not have referred to Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, as “Obama’s Baby Mama,’’ as it did on Wednesday in an on-screen headline commonly called a “chyron.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron
during the segment,” Bill Shine, a Fox News senior vice president, said in a statement.

The chyron appeared during a discussion between the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin and the Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly about political attacks against Mrs. Obama. It read in full, “Outraged Liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” It was first publicized on Wednesday by Alex Koppelman of Salon.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as one “chiefly in African-American usage” that refers to, “The mother of a man’s child, who is not his wife nor (in most cases) his current or exclusive partner.”

Earlier this week, the Fox News anchor E.D. Hill had apologized for raising the possibility that the Obamas affectionate fist bump during the senator’s victory rally in St. Paul on June 3 was “a terrorist fist jab.’’ Two weeks prior, the Fox News analyst Liz Trotta said she regretted making a joke about a possible assassination of Mr. Obama.

Let's say we're both in the same, crowded bar. You're minding your own business and, the next thing you know, I bump into your arm and make you spill your drink. I apologize, offer to replace your beer, and we go our separate ways. 20 minutes later, you're talking to the people you came with, and someone spills a drink on your shoulder.

Me, again.

I, once more, apologize, maybe buy you a round, and melt back into the crowd...until a half-hour later when I put my cigarette out on the back of your neck.

Now I ask you: would you think it was an accident?

In a word, no. HELL, no, in fact.

It probably wasn't after the second time, and it certainly wasn't after the third. At that point, that's not a accident, nor a mistake, and it absolutely isn't "poor judgment." You wouldn't believe that when picking Marlboro embers out of your neck, and you certainly shouldn't believe it, here, either.

Lapses in judgment, alone, cannot account for the same network connecting the same individual to assassination, terrorism, and unwed black mothers/absentee fathers in a matter of days.

Whether in our hypothetical bar or Faux "News" studios, that's not coincidence, it's a pattern. And, given that the pattern, in question, covers murder, odious lies, and racist stereotypes, it's a particularly indefensible one, at that.

Given the source, there's simply no benefit of the doubt to be had. The only poor judgment here, is in thinking that excuse would work, at all...