Media Wars - MSNBC's Touré & His Arrogant Verbal Attack On CNN's Piers Morgan

I am not a particular fan of Piers Morgan. I find him annoying quite frankly and more than a little arrogant at times. I don’t like his interview style or his habit of interrupting the people he’s interviewing. When it’s a celebrity, he can even get a bit cloying.

Having said that I acknowledge that he tends to be well-informed, reasonably objective and is not afraid of challenging those he interviews when they make a statement he believes is either incorrect or requires substantiation or amplification. Despite that, I seldom watch his program, Piers Morgan Tonight.

I did, however, watch his interview with the brother of George Zimmerman and his subsequent interview with Touré, an author and self-professed essayist who is also a contributor to MSNBC. Touré  has written a number of books, mostly fiction and is best-known for his writings about hip hop music and pop culture. He has recently been quite vocal in his views of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Watch these videos.

I have been around a long time but I have seldom seen such an arrogant and intolerant tirade as Touré delivered during this interview. He exemplifies precisely the kind of uninformed hatred for anything that contradicts his fiercely held opinions that has become the heart of the problem in race relations in America. Like too many, he doesn’t listen he talks and dismisses anyone and anything that doesn’t support his opinions with a conceit that is almost beyond imagining.

Touré is one of those narrow-minded people that like to think they have a monopoly on the truth while distorting it to serve their own prejudice. In Touré's case, it is intellectual posing and insecurity that is palpable.

He loves big words and clearly thinks that the ability to toss in words like obfuscate somehow elevates his opinion above that of everyone else and Mr. Morgan got it right when called Touré’s rant “a load of fatuous nonsense.”

It continues to amaze me that people like Touré are so quick to seize on one opportunistic moment to support their intolerance while ignoring both the broader issues and those events which tend to undermine their opinions.

He criticizes Mr. Morgan for not being tough enough on the brother of George Zimmerman but he is wrong. Mr. Morgan did challenge Mr. Zimmerman’s brother on a number of key issues. What Mr. Morgan didn’t do was accuse Mr. Zimmerman's brother of lying. He probed issues respectfully but pointedly and he didn’t attack him or speak down to him as Touré did Mr. Morgan.

I find people like Touré to be dangerous, ill-informed hypocrites. He criticized Pierce Morgan for his interview but is silent on Spike Lee’s depraved indifference to the safety of an elderly white couple when he retweeted the couple’s phone number and address in the belief that it was that of George Zimmerman.

To people like Touré, that wasn’t a hate crime or racist. Likewise, he is silent about the two black youths who doused a 13 year old white teenage boy in gasoline and then set him on fire in Kansas City earlier in March. That isn’t racist to him either.

For people like Touré and the Rev. Al Sharpton, there is no such thing as equality because they willingly choose to seize individual events that only support their intolerant opinions. I contrast their ravings with the simple, dignified approach taken by black students at Howard University who wanted to make a point about young black men and did so quite effectively.

Touré’s self-aggrandizing vocabulary doesn’t come close to their eloquence. They were able to get across their message about the racial profiling of young black men without the need to accuse, attack or blame.

It continues to amaze me how the mainstream media have, for the most part, lost complete control of their responsibility to objective reporting and informed analysis. Both Touré and the Rev. Al Sharpton have inserted themselves into the very story they are reporting for MSNBC. The Rev. Sharpton is now calling for boycotts and action against the community unless his demands aren’t met.

Likewise, Touré was silent on the new revelation that MSNBC has been forced to admit that it doctored evidence in the Trayvon Martin case that it had presented on its network.

It is unbelievable.

These men have no respect for due process, the presumption of innocence or even reasoned and objective analysis.  They claim to be in support of racial tolerance while exhibiting the very intolerance of those, like the Klan, who went before them. The only thing missing here is the white hood and a burning cross. They are intolerant, opportunistic and as much responsible for the racial divide in America as anyone they criticize.

At the end of the day, it isn’t fools like Touré and the Rev. Sharpton who will contribute to the advancement of racial tolerance and equality. It is young men like those in the Howard University video. It is those within both the black and the white communities who respect the rule of law and due process and those who understand that nothing of any value was ever built on intolerance, conceit or hatred.

Touré demonstrated quite effectively that whatever his qualifications may be for commenting on hip hop and pop culture, his knowledge and understanding of the word tolerance is quite limited. He also demonstrated conclusively that a big vocabulary is not a substitute for a small, intolerant mind.

You can dress it up anyway you like; try to hide it behind fancy words but in the end, bigotry by any other name is still bigotry.

RELATED:

Pierce Morgan interview with the brother of George Zimmerman: Part 1
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/03/30/piers-robert-zimmerman-jr-threats.cnn

Pierce Morgan interview with the brother of George Zimmerman: Part 2
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2012/03/30/piers-morgan-robert-zimmerman-jr-interview.cnn

Trayvon Martin: Do I look suspicious? - anti-racial profiling video by Howard University students
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH5bB8HUWFs

MSNBC Caught Distorting Evidence In Trayvon Shooting
http://grumpyelder.com/?p=21218

NBC launches internal investigation into altered 911 recording
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/03/31/NBC-Fanning-Flames

A better way to break down the barriers of intolerance and hatred
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2123384/Cyber-sleuth-Noel-traces-needs-die-Facebook-troll-offers-pay-studies.html

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