By Debbie Schlussel
It’s sad that Ed Bradley is no longer with us, because he was fair a lot more than most other liberals in the Mainstream Media. Not Fair Enough. But Fairer.
With most of the Mainstream Media, you can count on them to be unfair 97-100% of the time. With Bradley, the percentage was considerably lower (though not low enough).
Unfortunately, like that of the rest of the “60 Minutes” gang, one could always count on Ed Bradley’s reports on Israel and the Palestinians to be 100% biased and 100% anti-Israel. (Occasionally, though, he did a good piece against a Muslim extremist country or person.) Ditto for his awfully one-sided pieces on border and illegal alien issues.

That said, however, many of Bradley’s reports on other issues were fantastic and remarkably fair by any standard. Bradley’s piece on affirmative action at The University of Michigan and the Supreme Court lawsuit against it was spectacular and breathtaking.
Bradley treated my friends, Jennifer Gratz (then, the lawsuit Plaintiff and now head of the successful campaign to end affirmative action in Michigan) and Michigan Professor Carl Cohen, with fairness and respect–something they weren’t used to from most of the media. And he portrayed them fairly and objectively.
I’ll never forget when he asked then-Michigan Law School Dean Jeffrey Lehman to say why he needed affirmative action diversity at the law school. Lehman’s statement:

Well, we need Black students because they can talk about sentencing for crack cocaine use.

Yes, in Lehman’s view, being Black means having a connection with crack. That Bradley chose to keep that in his report was refreshing, showing us the true racist nature of affirmative action’s liberal supporters.
Most recently, there was his last big report on “60 Minutes,” his incredibly cogent and ire-inducing report on the legal lynching of the Duke lacrosse players who are alleged to have raped a stripper, and the flimsy “case” against them.
Both of these stories involved issues of race. However, but for being able to see Bradley’s skin color on the air, he never allowed his ethnicity to get in the way of doing a fair report. Unless you count his unfairness on the Mid-East.
And that’s better than I can say for most of the Mainstream Media. That’s why I will miss Ed Bradley.