NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me does a bit where they present three stories from the news the previous week, however two of them are false. One of the false stories they presented was that Michelle Malkin, who believes that Obama is a secret Muslim and that secret Muslims are trying to take over the country, found out that she has a secret Muslim grandfather. GentlyHewStone heard it and wrote about it: (h/t GateWayPundit)
First of all, while the humor of this segment was based on the idea that Malkin must be a hypocrite with a Muslim relative (which even the show acknowledged was untrue), the setup was based on the premise as I described it above, which the narrator clearly presented as factual.
I’ve followed Malkin’s blog and columns for years now, and she has never said that President Obama is a Muslim, nor does she believe that Muslims, “secret” or otherwise, are somehow “taking over this country.” While she does report on multiethnic strife in many areas of the world, including ours, as a result of political correctness and lack of assimilation, nothing she has ever written comes close to the bizarre, mean caricature aired this morning on NPR.
But NPR’s mistake goes far beyond mere slander. Their joke targeted the family of a specific conservative at a time when that specific conservative’s family is suffering a tragedy. Quite a coincidence. It’s been two weeks since Malkin’s cousin Marizela Perez went missing, possibly the victim of a kidnapping. Malkin has used her media presence tirelessly since then to help find her young relative. Either NPR and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me are not nearly as well-informed in their news awareness as they’d like us to believe, or they cruelly decided to go ahead with a particularly tasteless joke.
GatewayPundit writes:
NPR smeared Michelle Malkin today in a tasteless comedy segment. The channel aired a comedy sketch that suggested that Michelle was obsessed with Obama’s background and faith. Of course, this is not true at all.
I’m gonna have to disagree both with GatewayPundit and GentlyhewStone. I’m not sure I see this as a smear or slander to be honest. The point of the segment is to make something as believable as possible and their audience is quite liberal. Using a conservative stereotype would seem a good fit for their likely naive audience.
It’s really the timing that is unfortunate. Whether they knew about her missing cousin or not is something we’ll never know. I’m not in the business of ascribing motivations with no evidence, so I wouldn’t accuse them of trying to be malicious. We’ll just leave it at ‘unfortunate’.
Here’s the audio:
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UPDATE: I meant to make the obvious point, that your tax dollars paid for this. That’s probably the most unfortunate thing about this.
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UPDATE: Both Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey wrote about this today. Apparently I am in the minority based on my opinion.
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