October 3, 2008, - 11:10 am
Reporter Who Was Fired For Obama T-Shirt Was Always in the Tank for Obama
By Debbie Schlussel
I congratulate Detroit’s all-news radio station WWJ-AM for firing reporter Karen Dinkins for wearing an Obama T-shirt while covering an Obama rally for the station. I’m frankly surprised the station had the guts to do the right thing in the face of completely improper behavior by a supposedly impartial reporter. She is Exhibit A for legitimate conservative complaints that the mainstream media is biased and controlled by liberals with an agenda.
But I am more than a passing observer.
I know Karen, as she attends many of the Detroit movie critic screenings which I also attend. She’s very nice, a very good reporter, and I like her personally.
However, she’s been very much in the tank for Barack Obama for a long time, and it’s not just limited to a T-shirt. Recently, movie star Dennis Quaid was in town to promote his racially-charged movie, “The Express.” I was not among those invited to do interviews with him, but she was. At a recent screening, I asked her what he had to say. Her first answer was, “Oh, he’s really excited about Barack Obama. I asked him what he thinks about him, and he said he thinks Barack Obama adds a new, exciting energy to the race. He likes h im a lot.”
It’s true that Dennis Quaid–who in March, noted he was torn between McCain and Obama–is now entirely in the tank for Obama and appeared at a celebrity fundraiser for the Democratic nominee, a few days ago. But what does this have to do with reviewing a movie or reporting on it? It’s true that “The Express,” which I haven’t yet seen, is about racial integration of a college football team decades ago, but I still think it shows a reporter’s bias if she’s reporting on a movie and uses the interview with the star as a reason to promote a certain Presidential candidate.
Conservative reporters would never get hired in the first place. And if they did, we’d never know they were conservative reporters because they’d never get away with any of this . . . well before the T-shirt.
And Karen’s politics are definitely to the left–fine, if she keeps them out of her reporting. After we watched “Traitor,” the moral equivalency Don Cheadle movie about a Black man who is a Muslim undercover counterterrorist operative, I expressed disappointment that an FBI agent character says that Christians are terrorists just like Muslims because of the Klan. I said the Klan has been marginalized and is nothing like Islamic terrorism, which enjoys significant support throughout mainstream Islam. She expressed strong disagreement, saying the biggest problem facing America was not Islamic terrorism but the Klan.
So, I’m not surprised, with that point of view, that Karen Dinkins wore an Obama T-shirt while covering an Obama rally. To her, it’s simply no big deal because this is the type of thing her CBS-owned station has allowed for a long time. And that’s the problem.
Again, I like Karen, and she’s a good reporter. I feel bad for her that in this very tough Michigan economy she is out of a job, and I wish her success in getting another one soon, because she is such a nice person. But she should know better. She has a right to her far-left politics, but not while pretending to be an impartial observer delivering the news.
She will probably be hired again soon in the Detroit market, and hopefully will have learned her lesson about mixing partisan politics with delivering news. Oil and water go together better.
I’m not in the Detroit market and will NEVER be in the Detroit market but I see nothing to like about Dinkins. I tune “journalists” like Dinkins out. Has she ever written anything of value? I doubt it. What is there to like, Debbie?
lexi on October 3, 2008 at 12:28 pm