Whoa there, Chris Cuomo, slow downâyour ignorance is showing. On Thursday the CNN anchor was on Sirius XMâs POTUS channel and was trying to make a connection regarding what journalists feel when they hear the term âfake news.â
As reported by The Hill, the host of CNNâs New Day said:
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I see being called âfake newsâ as the equivalent of the n-word for journalists.
It is an ugly insult, and you had better be right if youâre going to charge a journalist with lying on purpose. The president was not right here, and heâs not been right in the past.
Umm, dafuq?
Out of all the places Cuomo couldâve gone with this, he drags the n-word into his conversation?
White people, seriously. Itâs Black History Month, for Christâs sake. I canât say this plainly enough: Please, pretty please, with Frederick Douglass on top, stop equating the struggle that black people have gone through to any first world problems youâre having. Your struggle, no matter how intense, is nothing like ours.
This isnât Cuomoâs first time being off pitch on race; in fact, he considered the idea of calling President Donald Trump racist âprovocative,â even though his guest was a New York Times reporter whoâd researched Trumpâs 45-year history of racist practices. In another instance, Cuomo found the âangry toneâ of Reza Aslan, a Muslim professor who challenged CNN hosts on the overgeneralization that all Muslims were somehow violent, to be an example of why people fear Muslims.
But letâs get back to this dude here: Chris Cuomo can compare journalistsâ assignments being called âfake newsâ to blacks being called nigger when he can show me that PBS documentary where millions of journalists were forced to work for free for 400 years and got lynched for daring to go to the White House press dinner.
The real is this: Cuomo was tight because the president came for him after an interview heâd done with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in which, the president claimed, Cuomo didnât press Blumenthal on charges that he lied about his service in Vietnam. Tweeted Trump:
Chris Cuomo, in his interview with Sen. Blumenthal, never asked him about his long-term lie about his brave âserviceâ in Vietnam. FAKE NEWS!
Cuomo reaired the portion of the interview showing that it was the topic of one of his first questions, and noted that the president was off again with his position on journalists.
âReally, [itâs] the first point I made in the interview,â Cuomo said on the Sirius XM show. âThe president, with all due respect, is once again off on the facts. And thatâs not something that any of us have any desire to say on a regular basis, but it keeps being true.â
So, battle Trump there. Say that heâs a liar; hell, call him a fake president, since we all suspect that Steve Bannon is really the one tweeting from his account and handing the president his bottle and Binky. But whatever you do, stop dragging us into your fight. Black people donât have anything to do with the fake-news charge. In fact, because of the lack of diversity in news, it is arguably the one thing black people canât be blamed for.
The president is taking shots against you, so shoot back. You donât need us to make your point. You didnât need to throw around anything that African Americans have gone through or will go through to fight your battle.
In fact, if you are ever confused, I will leave you a list of things you can never say your struggle is like:
slavery
racism
systematic oppression
police violence
anything that weâve ever gone through in the history of anything
Fight your own fights. The struggle that we face daily isnât here for you to use at your will. You donât get to pick through the murky history of American blackness to see what suits you.
And Cuomo knows this; in fact, he took to Twitter shortly afterward to apologize:
The president is maddening, and I get it. He says anything he wants to without facts, but black facts arenât pawns to be used in a white fight; and as much as it hurts America, the fake-news charge is a white fight, so letâs keep it that way.
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