Who’d a thunk it?
Neither the Los Angeles Times nor Politico (both of whom had multiple reporters) and a host of other mainstream media suspects, including the Associated Press, got to ask a single question Friday at Larry Elder’s first online Zoom press conference for the California gubernatorial recall.
The likes of the Bay Area Yu Channel, the Sing Tao Daily and Lynn Ku of KTSF did.
If you enjoy seeing MSM stuffed shirts being upended, it was quite a hoot. A reporter from the LAT—I won’t name him out of a courtesy he didn’t seem to have himself—was throwing a tantrum in the Zoom chat room due to his receiving a lack of attention.
And if you sense a pro-Asian bias in all this, you are obviously correct and it was obviously deliberate on the part of the Elder campaign. These seemingly small Asian outlets—considering the size of California’s Asian community, they could be quite big in actuality—were given the only opportunities to ask questions.
And their questions were quite substantive.
It was rather like the reverse of a White House press conference, particularly during the Trump era, when question after question from CNN et al was of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” nature.
Normally I abhor identity politics, but if a major population group in California—Asians are 14.7 percent of the state, while blacks are but 5.8 percent, according to the 2018 census—has been getting the short end of the proverbial stick, it is those Asian-Americans.
This is true in two areas especially—education where they have been the victims of negative discrimination for doing so well in school while being restricted in college admissions, and in the growing issue of street violence where they have been among the groups most subject to attack.
The first of these areas is pretty well known, having been the subject of lawsuits and so forth, but the reality of the second has been largely hidden by the mainstream media because most of this violence is black on Asian.
The MSM, not surprisingly, doesn’t want to talk about that. Elder, uniquely positioned to do so, did, during the press conference and, I would assume, elsewhere. As he put it, nothing changes if you don’t tell the truth.
