Because disenfranchising black voters isn’t sufficiently racist, two Republican National Convention attendees decided to make their party’s racism more explicit by throwing nuts at an African American CNN camera woman and saying, “This is how we feed animals.” The incident was first reported via twitter by David Shuster and has been confirmed by Talking Points Memo. CNN told TPM it could confirm “there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.” To be fair, the RNC condemned the behavior, stating, “Yesterday two attendees exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated.” I wonder how many apologies the RNC will have to issue over the course of the Convention.
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Two additional notes:
1. In their own post about this story, CNN doesn’t acknowledge that the camera operator was a woman. The omission, I think, was noteworthy.
2. There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Erik Wemple and Greg Sargent‘s blogs about what role CNN should play in reporting the story going forward.