Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was confronted Thursday in Atlanta by a mostly black crowd of pro-school choice demonstrators who oppose her anti-charter and anti-voucher platform on schools.
The tenor, volume, and unrelenting nature of the demonstration got to the point where Warren stepped back from her podium and called on Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts to deal with the protesters.
“What do we do with this?” the senator asked the black congresswoman of the activists, who were being shouted down at the time by Warren’s mostly white supporters.
Pressley then took the microphone and admonished the demonstrators, promising them that Warren would talk about “the contributions fighters like you have made to history,” adding further that they should not “dishonor” that history.
Unsurprisingly, neither the Washington Post nor MSNBC, both of which have dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to promoting Warren’s 2020 Democratic primary campaign, have made any effort to cover the incident, despite its inherent newsworthiness. Then again, what else would you expect from the same newsrooms that act as the Massachusetts senator’s official hagiographers?
MSNBC, the news coverage of which used the term “ultimate clapback” to describe Warren’s unrealistic plan to fund her even more unrealistic $34 trillion “Medicare for all” proposal, has yet to publish a report detailing Thursday’s pro-school choice protests of the senator’s campaign event.
One of the cable news network’s hosts did, however, mention the Atlanta incident Friday at about noon during a broadcast of Andrea Mitchell Reports. But the demonstrations came up only so that the show’s host, Mitchell, could ask the New York Times’ s Jeremy Peters whether South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign can overcome its struggle to attract black voters.
You cannot make this stuff up.
The Washington Post, which published a glowing profile of Warren in October that reads like it was written by an adolescent fan, has not reported a single detail of Thursday’s pro-school choice protests.
The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” newspaper did, however, publish a lengthy defense on Friday of Warren’s pre-K-12 school reform plan. The Washington Post also published a report early Friday morning titled, “How women candidates are making girls feel better about politics.” News you can use.
It boggles the mind that neither MSNBC nor the Washington Post believes it is newsworthy that one of the top-tier 2020 Democratic candidates was met Thursday with protests at her own campaign event. It is even crazier that these newsrooms skipped the story when one takes into consideration both its racial undertones and the fact that organizations such as MSNBC usually jump at the chance to talk about the intersection of race and politics. Some of us still remember the cable network’s 2012 presidential election programming, which included discussions about whether the words “Chicago,” “golf,” and “angry” were racist dog whistles.
A white senator who used to claim minority status calling on a black congresswoman to quiet down a crowd of mostly black demonstrators? Yeah, that seems at least a little newsworthy. It is extremely telling that MSNBC and the Washington Post believe otherwise.
