Soledad O’Brien @ Harvard

How does a media bias translate to an academic one? When a practitioner of the former gets to ply her trade in the Ivory Tower.

“Harvard Graduate School of Education has named award-winning journalist and author Soledad O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the 2013-14 academic year,” the school announced. O’Brien is a 2000 graduate of Harvard College.

“Through her work on Black in America, Latino in America, and other journalistic endeavors, Soledad has focused America’s attention on the important issue of education inequality,” GSE Dean Kathleen McCartney proudly announced. “In addition, with her husband Brad, she founded and leads the Soledad O’Brien and Brad Raymond Foundation, which provides funds and support for young women with leadership potential to attend college despite facing economic or personal challenges.”

“We are tremendously excited to welcome Soledad to the Harvard Graduate School of Education community and look forward to working with her to ensure that all children have access to a high quality education.” To be sure, the O’Briens should be lauded for their charitable work.

What Mrs. O’Brien does in her day job is another story:

• As Cliff Kincaid reported late last year for Accuracy in Media, Accuracy in Academia’s sister group, she used one appearance on CNN to push for gun control in the wake of a school shooting in Connecticut, a state where firearms are rather strictly regulated.
• AIM chairman Don Irvine pointed out on March 8, 2013, that “On Wednesday morning’s Starting Point on CNN, panelists Will Cain and John Berman called out host Soledad O’Brien for taking out of context Fox News president Roger Ailes’ observation that President Obama is ‘lazy.’”

But the best is yet to come. “On Thursday, O’Brien interviewed Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief of the late Andrew Breitbart’s online empire,” Michelle Malkin reported in a column AIM posted on March 14, 2012. “Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com released a 1991 video of Barack Obama (then a 30-year-old law student) at a Harvard rally embracing radical racialist Derrick Bell and his push for more aggressive race-based hiring at Harvard.”

“Bell is a proponent of critical race theory (CRT), which posits that America remains a hopelessly racist country dominated by Jews and white supremacists.”

“That is a complete misreading of critical race theory,” O’Brien told Pollak. “That’s an actual theory.”

“You could Google it and some would give you a good definition. So that’s not correct!”

“When viewers took to Twitter to pepper O’Brien with follow-up questions about critical race theory, the CNN star had a twit fit,” Malkin recounted. “She invited a liberal professor, Emory University’s Dorothy Brown, on her television show to back her up and then lashed out.”

“See?” said O’Brien. “That was our critical race theory 101. Stop tweeting me. We have moved on, people.”

“O’Brien failed to disclose her pro-Bell bias to viewers before her segments,” Malkin averred. “O’Brien also failed to disclose that the liberal prof who denied on her show that critical race theory had aaaaaanything to do with bashing America as a white supremacy-ruled government actually wrote the exact opposite.”

“In one of her own books, Brown asserted that the purpose of CRT was to ‘highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color.’”

 

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
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