Writers for the Media Research Center has said a lot of things about Mark Halperin calling President Obama “kind of a dick” on the June 30 edition of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” None of them criticized Halperin for doing so, and all of them were unable to spell out the word “dick.”
In the first NewsBusters post on the incident, Mark Finkelstein — who spelled it “d–k” — appeared to react to Halperin’s insult the way he attributed to “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski: “shocked amusement.”
In a follow-up NewsBusters post noting that Halperin had been suspended from MSNBC over the remark, Tim Graham went the euphemism route, substituting “[Short for Richard]” and “[male appendage]” for “dick.”
The MRC then went the usual equivocation route, with Geoffrey Dickens complaining that nobody on MSNBC was suspended for “particularly distasteful things to say about a then sitting President George W. Bush.” But Dickens joined his MRC in colleagues in censoring Halperin’s word, this time as “d-ck,” while did not censor any of the “particularly distasteful things” he claimed were said about Bush.
Noel Sheppard, meanwhile, completely avoided any sort of direct quote, saying only that Halperin made “an intemperate remark.” Then he ranted that MSNBC is “the leading television propaganda outlet for this White House” and that “MSNBC was making it quite clear that until Election Day has passed, MSNBC personalities and contributors better be very careful what they say about the current White House resident.”