Newsroom coverage of a racially charged joke shared by Hillary Clinton and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio was soft-pedaled after the story was initially ignored for three days.
Newsweek, for example, published a story days after the incident promising to explain the joke. CBS News meanwhile went with a report that referred to the controversial gag as “race-based.”
Is “race-based” how we’re saying “racist” now pic.twitter.com/vJyCO1VXZH
— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) April 12, 2016
The mayor, whose family is interracial, joked with Clinton during a scripted comedy routine Saturday evening at the annual Inner Circle Dinner in New York City that he runs on “CP time.”
“CP time” generally means “colored people’s time,” which is a racial stereotype suggesting black people are frequently late to events. The mayor didn’t actually say the term “colored people’s,” and instead used the acronym.
After he made the joke, which centered on him explaining why it took him so long to endorse Clinton in the Democratic primary, the former secretary of state jumped in to explain “CP” stood for “cautious politician.”
The initial reaction from major media was muted.
The majority of timely reactions in the press came from a smattering of journalists who voiced their displeasure on social media, and a few blogs immediately published disapproving write-ups.
For the nation’s largest newsrooms, however, coverage of the joke didn’t appear until Tuesday, a full three days after the event, and even then most of what was published focused more on reactions to the incident.
“Racially Charged Joke by Hillary Clinton and Bill de Blasio Leaves Some Cringing,” reported the New York Times.
The Washington Post published a story that same day with a similar theme regarding reactions to the event, bearing the headline, “NYC mayor, Hillary Clinton taking heat over comedy skit.”
The Post also uploaded a video of the comedy routine to its website Tuesday, but, again, this was long after the event had taken place.
Likewise, ABC News reported more on the criticism than on the joke itself. And like the Post, ABC uploaded video of the moment to its website nearly 72 hours after the fact.
MSNBC meanwhile published a story Tuesday that covered the incident from the angle that a racially charged joke may not be the most helpful thing for Clinton ahead of the April 19 New York Democratic primary.
The MSNBC report also referred to the joke as a “gaffe” and a “faux pas.”
A report from National Public Radio hit the same angle as MSNBC, and noted that the scripted comedy routine was a bit of “unfortunate timing” for Clinton.
In contrast to these and other headlines from the nation’s leading newsrooms, the left-leaning “explainer” website Vox.com straight up called the joke “racist” this week.
The most-circulated papers in the United States, including the Times, the Post, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, again made no mention of the incident on their front pages.
In contrast, there were a considerable number of mentions of the joke Tuesday on cable and network television, but these came days after the incident.
Clinton responded Tuesday to criticism for her involvement in the scripted comedy routine by putting all the blame on the mayor, who had just endorsed her in the Democratic presidential primary.
“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio’s skit,” she told Cosmopolitan magazine. “He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”
The show was scripted, though, suggesting she knew well ahead of time what was going to be said.
“It was clearly a staged show. It was a scripted show. The whole idea was to do the counterintuitive by saying ‘cautious politician time,” the mayor told CNN this week. “Every actor thought it was a joke on a different convention. That was the whole idea. I think people are missing the point here.”
His office said later in a separate statement, “In an evening of satire, the only person this was meant to mock was the mayor himself, period. Certainly no one intended to offend anyone.”
