INTERVIEW – JOE CONCHA – Media reporter/columnist for The Hill
TOPIC: Media has become unhinged over Charlottesville/Trump/statues
– ESPN’s Robert Lee move displays political correctness at its worst (The Hill/Joe Concha) — From the “you have to be kidding me” files, ESPN is removing a play-by-play announcer named Robert Lee from a University of Virginia football game in September because he has the same name as Confederate general Robert E. Lee. ESPN’s Lee is an Asian-American. He’ll be transferred to call a Youngstown State-Pitt game instead, which won’t be televised. The University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville, which was the scene of white supremacist violence that left one woman dead on August 12. That violence was inspired by the city’s decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue. So in applying the same infinite, pandering wisdom that TV Land displayed in 2015 when it took “The Dukes of Hazard” off the air because the characters owned a car called “The General Lee,” ESPN must have decided that its viewers would applaud its move to take Lee off the game.
– Eugene Robinson: Trump’s media attacks at rally ‘deeply disturbing’ (The Hill/Joe Concha) – MSNBC analyst and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson slammed President Trump’s attacks on the media at a rally in Phoenix Tuesday night, calling his rhetoric “deeply disturbing.” “The thing about the speech last night was how sad and predictable it was,” Robinson told “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough. “I didn’t know he’d spend so much time on that. It was deeply disturbing and offensive the way he spoke of the media.”
– Wall Street Journal Editor Admonishes Reporters Over Trump Coverage. (NY Times) — Gerard Baker, the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, has faced unease and frustration in his newsroom over his stewardship of the newspaper’s coverage of President Trump, which some journalists there say has lacked toughness and verve. Some staff members expressed similar concerns on Wednesday after Mr. Baker, in a series of blunt late-night emails, criticized his staff over their coverage of Mr. Trump’s Tuesday rally in Phoenix, describing their reporting as overly opinionated. “Sorry. This is commentary dressed up as news reporting,” Mr. Baker wrote at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday morning to a group of Journal reporters and editors, in response to a draft of the rally article that was intended for the newspaper’s final edition. He added in a follow-up, “Could we please just stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism?”
