Maybe it was intentional. Like they were trying to tie the Herman Cain sexual harassment accusations to the case at Penn State. Alexander Cockburn on Counterpunch.org pointed out that this was a problem for Cain, the news of the accusations against him appearing side-by-side on the front pages with with the horrible crimes Jerry Sandusky is alleged to have committed.
It's hard for me to get too worked up about sexual harassment. After Clinton, Packwood, Clarence Thomas and all the others, there's been too much hypocrisy to take much of the outrage too seriously.
Here's something from Ishmael Reed's essay posted on Counterpunch.org. You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/05/herman-cain-the-latest-black-boogeyman/
...Obama critic, Chris Matthews, spent a half hour one day scolding Cain. At the end, he made tribute to JFK, who is my man, but he left out the part of JFK’s sexual addiction that led him to engage prostitutes off the streets. Now, they tell us that those were different times and different press coverage, but what about women who were threatened? That if they told about their sexual relations they’d be committed to mental institutions. “Starlets” were warned by their agents that if they didn’t abide the president’s enormous sexual appetites, their careers would be affected. Why isn’t Matthews concerned about what Seymour Hersh calls “The Dark Side of Camelot?”I’ll bet Cain wishes he’d gotten some of the man love that Strauss- Kahn received after he was accused of raping a hotel worker. The New York Times, which might do a whole page on a couple of black kids knocking over waffle houses, but hides multimillion dollar corporate white male crimes on the business pages, just about became a member of Kahn’s defense team, tagging along as he dined in expensive restaurants, and admiring his art collection. (I go into the history of white men raping black women and being set free by white juries, who bought the defense’s argument that “they wanted it,” in my forthcoming book, “Going Too Far,” whose title originated in a review by a young white Hip Hop critic of my book “Juice!” He said that I’ve gone “too far.”)
I’ll bet that Cain wishes he’d had progressive feminists like MSNBC’s Krystal Ball go to bat for him. And maybe NPR’s Nina Totenberg, who sympathized with ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner....
Ms.Ball sat up there on MSNBC and blasted Cain while sitting next to Martin Bashir, who was rewarded with a show because of his sewer ambush journalism on Michael Jackson. On his Friday’s show Bashir even dragged in Tiger Woods, which must be the cynical strategy of the networks, the bunching of black males involved in scandal. (Of course,the Exxon and General Electric owned media aren’t the only ones who play this particular race card for money. TheRoot, a zine that Henry Louis Gates fronts for The Washington Post couldn’t meet its payroll without featuring “Black Boogeymen”). The shameless Bashir even made some corny lectures scolding Cain. This is the same Bashir who made remarks before some Asian American women journalists of such a sexually explicit nature that he had to apologize.
According to the British publication Sun, “TELLY journalist Martin Bashir left an audience stunned after a tirade of sexist gags during an after-dinner speech. Bashir hinted he was getting sexually excited while speaking to the Asian American Journalists Association.
“The London-born ABC news host told the Chicago bash: ‘I’m happy to be in the midst of so many Asian babes. In fact, I’m happy the podium covers me from the waist down.’”
“He then upset co-host Juju Chang by claiming a speech should be like a dress — ‘long enough to cover the important parts and short enough to keep your interest, like my colleague Juju’s’”. This is the guy who said that Cain should not only withdraw from the presidential race but resign from his post as associate minister of a church. Krystal Ball said nothing about the hypocrisy of Bashir while blasting Cain. She probably wants to keep her job. Or maybe she feels that Asian American women don’t count and that his mass sexual harassment against Asian American women is of negligible interest. After all, minority women have protested that their issues are treated lightly by the feminist mainstream. Maybe that’s why Cain critics, among whom are women, who had big laughs about the destruction of Cain, won’t turn their attention to the rape statistics involving Native American women; 80% of Native American rape victims are raped by white men. Maybe Soledad O’Brien will cover it in a “Native American in America.”
...
The only attention given Native American rape victims was by Al Gore’s Current TV, which also tackled the issue of “hundreds” of Boston white kids dying from heroin overdoses, “Gateway to Heroin,” the kind of stories that would alienate CNN’s and MSNBC’s market and advertiser and whose target audience of “angry white males,” according to Rick Sanchez, would find bummers.
So Cain is done and maybe deservedly so. Some of the women who helped to destroy him are saying that serial philanderer Newt Gingrich will probably benefit from the suspension of his campaign....
...
I might note here that Reed was still glad Cain was gone. Read the article!... But why the jokes and laughter about Cain? His relationship with women even ridiculed by David Letterman of all people. And Joe Scarborough. At least nobody died as a result of Cain’s alleged adultery.
Guys like Scarborough don’t have an idea about what it takes for a black man to rise in the corporate world, without nepotism, and networking at country clubs, without leaning on classmates from Yale and Harvard. Blacks have been excluded from the capitalist system since Reconstruction, when, if they looked prosperous, they were lynched or had their were farms taken over through trickery. They lost thousands of acres of property when banished from towns by mobs and when they try to exercise a right of return, they are confronted by Tea Party types, threatening them and waving confederate flags. They’ve been red lined and sub primed, even with good credit and charged higher interest than whites who have lower credit ratings than they. They’ve lost hundreds of billions of dollars as result of racist polices of the FHA and other institutions.
Franklin Roosevelt made a deal with Dixiecrats that excluded them from some of the benefits of the New Deal.
The G.I.Bill, which brought millions of white ethnics into the middle class was known as “the white G.I. Bill.” Even Herman Cain’s being associated with fast foods has been ridiculed, and if he were on welfare he’d be ridiculed too. Would progressives have given him some slack had he merchandised organic sunflower seeds?
The typical all white giggling media jury that Howard Kurtz convened on Sunday, Dec.4,to ridicule Cain (including Steve Roberts who repeated Tiger Woods obsessed and Imus Alumni Kurtz’s fucking lazy lie that Obama received favorable coverage during the campaign) haven’t the slightest idea the shit that a black man has to take to excel in the corporate world. They couldn’t imagine the problems that the late Reginald Lewis, head of Beatrice International and one of my patrons had to endure to the day of his death. There was almost cheering when his house burned down and when he was dying of a brain tumor he was subjected to cruel treatment by The New York Times which gives too- big- to- fail white male crooks gentle treatment every day....
And so another prominent black man has been grilled by a media that, in terms of diversity, still lags behind Mississippi....
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