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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Skin-deep Electioneering

{ link » Subject•Article}

The Chicago Tribune's subject article confirms a telling statistic I noted previously — Obama won more than 9 in 10 blacks. In its presentation, however, the article is contrived to obscure:
RACE EMERGING AS ISSUE IN DEMOCRATIC CAMPAIGN

By Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, WASHINGTON BUREAU Tribune reporter John McCormick contributed from Chicago

March 13, 2008

WASHINGTON - Despite the celebration of Barack Obama's electoral successes as evidence that the nation has moved beyond racial divisions, signs are emerging of a small but unmistakable race-based resistance to his historic White House bid.

Beneath Obama's easy win in Mississippi on Tuesday, exit polls show a state polarized along racial lines, with white Democrats there rejecting his candidacy 70 percent to 26 percent, while 9 of 10 blacks voted for him. It's a dramatic reflection of a recurrent pattern most pronounced in the South. [my emphasis added]
Note, if you will, the emphasized [by me] subtleties, which I submit are not unintentional shadings of the purported factual presentation:
  • The phrase "unmistakable race-based resistance" pronounces the editorial conclusion in the leading paragraph. Pardon me, but "9 of 10", and more accurately "92% to 8%", is significantly more "unmistakable" than "70% to 26%".
  • The unmistakable conclusion, as I observed previously, is race-based support for Obama.
  • The phrase "rejecting his candidacy" is much more emphatic, let alone misleading, than the phrase "voted for him".
My understanding of this article is that there is race-based electioneering in the main stream media. So what else is new?

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