I don’t care what one’s partisan predispositions are, referring to the wife of a major party’s presumptive nominee as a “baby mama” is disrespectful and inappropriate:
For those unfamiliar, “baby mama” is slang for a single mother . From a Slate piece:
The Oxford English Dictionary defines baby-daddy as “the father of a woman’s child, who is not her husband or (in most cases) her current or exclusive partner.” The baby-mama entry follows the same template with the genders reversed.
Further, because the term (according to the article, and something I was vaguely aware of) has hip hop and R&B origins, there is a certain racial implication here as well. Indeed, to refer to a black woman as a someone’s “baby mama” (it seems to me) connotes the idea of single, inner city mother with multiple children from likely multiple fathers.
As I said: disrespectful and inappropriate.
Here’s the actual video (via Salon):
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Filed under: 2008 Campaign, US Politics | |
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June 12th, 2008 at 11:39 am
It’s Fox. Enough said.
(OOOH!! Dr. Taylor has installed Ajax Edit Comments. Yippeeee!)
June 12th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
I don’t think anything said on Fox News surprises me anymore. They are obviously more concerned with causing controversy to get ratings than fairly reporting on the facts. The way they have treated the Obamas throughout the race has been shameful.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
I can see why you and the other commenters are upset. This ranks right up there with calling random female reporters sweetheart….
On the other hand, could Fox be deliberately doing this in response to Obama’s sweetheart habit?
June 12th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Quixote,
Is it really that much to ask for a major new outlet to show a little class?
June 12th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Is it really that much to ask for a major party candidate to show a little class? Or do you have higher expectations for the media than you do for a presidential candidate?
I’m defending neither Fox nor Obama. I just find it amusing that people are making a big deal over the one even though they never even brought up the other. If you did cover Obama’s crassness in the past, my apologies. However, I just searched your site for “sweetheart” and did not find a reference to Obama.
June 12th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I think you are creating a false dichotomy here–i.e., that my only options are to decry both or neither.
Really, I am never a big fan of “yeah, well look what he did” as a defense of a specific action. Surely the “sweetheart” deployment neither adds nor subtracts from the “baby mama” usage. Indeed, this is the kind of argument my kids use all the time to try and obviate their own guilt in a situation (”but, Dad, brother did the following…”).
And while I don’t think it matters, I personally find the “baby mama” usage more problematic than the “sweetheart” one, especially after the “terrorist first jab” business. My lack of blogging on the sweetheart reference is simply because I didn’t have anything to say about it. Regardless, I don’t see the two terms as equivalent.
I would not that I am not in high dudgeon over “baby mama” (indeed, I think my post is fairly even keeled). I simply consider it inappropriate and unnecessarily disrespectful.
June 12th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
We get 5 months of this.
We’re just getting started. I can’t wait to see what is being said in 2, 3 months.
It’s going to be awesome, in a crane-your-head-at-the-trainwreck kind of way.
I can’t wait.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Must read on this: John Scalzi (hat tip to Phil Klinkner at PolySigh).
June 16th, 2008 at 9:24 am
Dr. Taylor, you should read The Daily Howler (http://www.dailyhowler.com/). IRRC, the editor, Bob Somerby, expressed these sentiments a while back - possibly before 2004, which made them prophetic (I’m working from memory):
‘The media treated Gore like they did not because of anything that he did or didn’t do, but because he was the Democratic candidate. They’ll treat *any* Democratic candidate for president the same way.’
That was vindicated in 2004, and is undeniably the way things are shaping up now - even after the two-term disaster[1] that is the Bush administration.
What’s going on now, and what you will see over the next few months, is predictable. The elite MSM will bias towards the GOP as much as possible. You’re probably old enough to remember 1980; Bush’s popularity is at or below Carter’s, things are as bad, and getting worse, and it’s 100% Bush’s fault. But John ‘four more years’ McCain will be treated more as is Bush was successful, or at least as if McCain wasn’t an eager accomplice and accessory to Bush’s crimes, corruption and screw-ups.
Any analysis which doesn’t start from that set of assumptions is pretty much based firmly in the clouds.
- Barry
[1] Disaster for 99% of Americans, and most of the rest of the world. The people who run the elite MSM have profited immensely, of course.