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Black Journalists Group Calls Popular Columnist a Racist

Posted Aug. 7, 2008 – Conservative columnist and political pundit Pat Buchanan's “primal racial fears” have blinded him from recognizing the inequities that persist in America, the organization that represents African-American journalists said in a response to one of his recent commentaries.
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An acid-tongued political analyst for such networks as CNN and MSNBC, Buchanan is an author, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and three-time presidential candidate. The action that sparked the response from the National Association of Black Journalists was his column, "Whitey Need Not Apply," a 900-word essay blasting the efforts of UNITY – the national consortium of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native-American journalists – to promote racial and ethnic fairness within media.

Buchanan is livid about UNITY’s attempt to convince 10 major media outlets to promote at least one person of color to a senior manager position on each of their staffs over the next two years.

“The journalist may be Asian, African-American, Native American or Hispanic, which rules out journalists of Irish, English, Polish, Italian, German or Jewish ancestry, since they are [W]hite,” Buchanan writes. “Is this what we have come to 50 years after the triumph of the civil rights movement? Flat-out demands, by American journalists, for the hiring and promotion of colleagues based on race and color? Is there any evidence major news organizations in this country have engaged in systematic discrimination to keep out men or women of color this last half century? The reverse seems true. They have bent over backward to advance minority journalists.”

But NABJ founder Les Payne, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and columnist for Newsday, writes in the association’s response to the “Whitey” column that Buchanan is as subtle as a clenched fist about his "‘White folks’ superiority crusade.

Despite Buchanan's backward know-nothingness, he reigns nightly as a TV presence on political chat- shows. His countenance recalls nothing so much as that of the Joker, lacking only the red lip smear and the dark eye paint. Flip on almost any channel tonight and there is this scared and scary Buchanan, chopping the air with his hands-pedaling his gospel of hate.” 

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