Topic: Media Research Center
When comedian Kevin Hart lost his job as host of next year's Oscars when old homophobic jokes and Twitter posts resurfaced -- one of which called a critic a "FAT FAG" -- the Media Research Center's Jacob Comello was outraged ... for Hart, ranting that Hart had committed a "thought crime" in the eyes of liberal Hollywood allegedly eager to destroy his career:
For the Hollywood left, there is no forgiveness, let alone consistency. There is only a volatile mob mentality that, if dissented from, will get one’s career destroyed.
Kevin Hart, an African American comedian who has appeared in Scary Movie 3, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, and other comedies, announced on Tuesday that he had been selected to host the 2019 Academy Awards, according to Huffington Post. Almost immediately, opposition to the Academy’s decision came pouring in from left-leaning journalists, many of them LGBT types. The reason: people had discovered tweets the comedian made years ago which contained gay jokes.
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[Buzzfeed writer David] Mack’s censure (“just imagine if this was any other marginalised group”) is rather interesting, considering the fact that Travon Free, a writer for Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal TBS show, faced a similar incident earlier this year when his old anti-Semitic tweets began to resurface. But for Free, there was hardly media hype at all: A< few articles on smaller media sites covered it, and TBS never issued an official condemnation.
So Mack may have a point in saying the media treats some minorities worse than others, but LGBT people certainly aren’t at the bottom of that totem pole.
Note that Comello wasn't outraged at all by Hart's homophobic content at all -- apparently because gays are no longer sufficiently discriminated against for him to be concerned about -- but only that he was being held accountable for it.\
By contrast, when a perceived enemy of the MRC makes an anti-gay remark, that person gets attacked as not just hateful but mentally deranged to boot. Scott Whitlock huffed in a Dec. 12 post:
The unhinged hosts of Morning Joe on Wednesday took it to a new level, sliming Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as unpatriotic and a “wannabe dictator’s butt boy.” The vulgar language was so bad that MSNBC producers tried to cut Mika Brzezinski’s audio, just missing her disgusting attack.
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Just last week, Brzezinski’s co-host and husband, Joe Scarborough, cited the need for civility in the wake of the death of George H.W. Bush: “You can have a contentious relationship with people professionally and still save your humanity the way George H.W. Bush did for people.... It's an example we all have to follow.”
Still save your humanity? Maybe the hosts at MSNBC should start by not calling the Secretary of State a “wannabe dictator’s butt boy.”
When Brzezinski apologized for the remark a couple days later, the MRC did what Comello complained about in his Hart post: deemed that her apology was insufficient. Mark Finkelstein complained:
When you apologize for using a term that you yourself call "vulgar, crass and offensive," wouldn't you include in your apology the person against whom you used it? Apparently not, if you're Mika Brzezinski, and the person you insulted is a prominent conservative.
Returning to Morning Joe today after a day off for "a family matter," Mika Brzezinski apologized for having on Wednesday's show called Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a "butt boy." NewsBusters editor Scott Whitlock reported the slur here. But whereas Brzezinski apologized "especially to the LGBT community" and to her colleagues, she didn't apologize . . . to Mike Pompeo.
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This NewsBuster doesn't consider Brzezinski's words a firing offense. But if anything, Mika today compounded her mistake by failing to apologize to the person she insulted.
Weird how the MRC thinks anti-gay slurs are "disgusting" when someone on MSNBC says them but somehow noble enough to elevated to a "thought crime" when Kevin Hart says them.
