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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

MSNBC Anchor Andrea Mitchell Calls Southwest Virginians 'Rednecks"

In the first video, Andrea Mitchell, anchor for MSNBC was speaking images of Barack Obama and Senator Mark Warner in southwest Virginia, where she said, "This is real redneck, sort of...um, bordering on Appalachia country. This is not the northern Virginia, sort of, high tech corridor. These are not voters he would logically be gravitating to."

YouTube video URL.



That led to the editor of Bristol Herald Courier (in Bristol, Virginia), J. Todd Foster, to write a column which blasted her for stereotyping. The title of his piece was, "Thank You, Andrea Mitchell, For The Ready-Made Column."

Foster starts that column with, "I learned something about myself Thursday that I did not know: I’m a redneck. But then again, so is every one of you reading this column. Or so says Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. "

He ends up making the ultimate point, saying,, "But the last bastion of acceptable, politically incorrect stereotyping is making fun of Southerners. And we’re damned tired of it."

He mocks the type of thinking that led to her politically incorrect comment by saying:

You know, uhm, I’ve been wondering where all these urges of late have been coming from – namely the desire to trade my Toyota Camry for a pickup, complete with rubber bull testicles (product name: bumper nuts) dangling from the trailer hitch. I’m inexplicably craving chew tobacco. I passed a road-kill possum Friday and thought it looked tasty. And I nearly wore a wife-beater T-shirt to Wal-Mart yesterday, until my wife intervened with “that’s not a good look for you.”


Evidently Foster wasn't the only one that took offense to her phrasing because three days after issuing the remark that seemed to offend the good people of Southwest Virginia, Mitchell issued an apology at the end of her one hour show.

She said, "I owe an apology to the good people of Bristol, Virginia for something stupid that I said."



Is this type of stereotyping that is stereotypical now of television "news" anchors on MSNBC and NBC?

If you look at the comments in the TVNewser comment section, you will people comparing this type of stereotyping to the "bitter" comments that Barack Obama made about middle America and how they cling to their religion and guns because they are bitter.


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