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Friday, June 22, 2012

Politico's White House Correspondent Suspended For Anti-Romney Comments And Tweets, Cites 'Standards'

By Susan Duclos


Joseph Williams, who according to his Politico bio page is the "White House Correspondent for Politico," has been suspended for televised comments in conjunction with Tweets he sent out to his followers.

One instance is captured on video where Williams explains that Mitt Romney is relaxed around "white folks," other examples of his strange tweets below the Politico announcement of his suspension.

[WATCH VIDEO]






Note- The show Williams is on is not a "news" show, so opinions are part of the interaction between hosts and guests, and the network itself should not be held accountable for what a guest says on an opinion show, just as on Fox News Channel they have shows that are news coverage and also shows similar to the MSNBC show that Williams is on above. Despite many claiming that opinion shows should somehow be representative of a network itself, it isn't so.

It is Williams, the guests, especially if they are so-called objective journalists, that need to police their own comments for the sake of journalistic integrity.

Williams failed miserably to do so.

Via Politico:

On MSNBC today, Williams made a remark suggesting Mitt Romney was only comfortable around white people. The video was first flagged by conservative website Washington Free Beacon. Breitbart.com ran the video and also flagged a series of tweets Williams had written that made fun of the Republican candidate, particularly in regard to his wealth.

"Regrettably, an unacceptable number of Joe Williams's public statements on cable and Twitter have called into question his commitment to this responsibility," POLITICO's founding editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei wrote in a memo to the staff. "His comment about Governor Romney earlier today on MSNBC fell short of our standards for fairness and judgment in an especially unfortunate way."

"Joe has acknowledged that his appearance reflected a poor choice of words," the continued. "This appearance came in the context of other remarks on Twitter that, cumulatively, require us to make clear that our standards are serious, and so are the consequences for disregarding them. This is true for all POLITICO journalists, including an experienced and well-respected voice like Joe Williams."

"Following discussion of this matter with editors, Joe has been suspended while we review the matter," they wrote.

Breitbart captured some of Williams' Twitter comments, which need to be seen there because as of now, Mr. Williams Twitter account is suddenly protected and the offensive tweets might disappear by the time he opens it back up.




An example of the Williams' tweets Brietbart captured below:



That is just a small sample, go to Breitbart to see more tweets from Williams showing that he is a partisan journalist with the liberal bias that is so prevalent within Politico and many other mainstream news outlets.



The surprising thing here isn't that Williams made these types of remarks but that Politico actually suspended him for them, citing "our standards for fairness and judgment."

A number of Politico writers were part of the left wing, now dismantled, JournoList list serv, where left wing media operatives discussed how to coordinate their messaging in favor of Barack Obama and Democrats among other things.

Examples of Politico's JournoList members include: Ben Adler, Mike Allen, Lisa Lerer, Laura Rozen, Ben Smith and Avi Zenilman.

JournoList partial Membership list found HERE.

Politico citing "standards for fairness and judgment" in Williams suspension, is laughable in light of the JournoList scandal.