Former Fox News contributor and current Columbia professor Marc Lamont Hill speaks on his experience at Fox during an interview with WHYY Radio.

Hill said many opinion hosts on the network “turned off the mikes” of those who did not agree with their conservative views.

Marc Lamont Hill, the liberal counterweight against the conservative line-up at Fox News was given his walking papers.

While both Fox and Hill have been quiet about the situation, but Huffington Post reports FOX was under pressure to remove Hill due to his “sympathies” for Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur.

Hill is a professor at Columbia University.

Fair and balanced, eh.

The political right wing hates President Obama because he’s Black, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said, according to conservative FOX News commentator Sean Hannity, who’s all too happy to make a link between the Communist leader and the U.S. president.  “President Obama has acquired a new and unexpected ally,” said Hannity in his FOX column. “Cuba’s ex-president Fidel Castro is sticking up for Obama, blaming the right wing for sabotaging the president’s agenda!” Hannity cites an editorial in Cuba’s state-run newspaper, in which Castro writes, “The extreme right hates him for being African-American and fights what the president does to improve the deteriorated image of that country. …I don’t have the slightest doubt that the racist right will do everything possible to wear him down, blocking his program to get him out of the game, one way or the other.”

Renowned Barack basher Glenn Beck is facing a boycott after telling his FOX News audience that President Obama hates White people. “This president has exposed himself as a guy over and over and over again who has a deep seated  hatred for White people … This guy is, I believe, a racist,” Beck said in an appearance on the “Fox & Friends” morning show on July 28. He was commenting on Obama’s reaction to the arrest of Black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates by White Cambridge Police Sgt. James Crowley 12 days earlier. Following the quip, more than 75,000 members of the public advocacy group Color of Change signed a petition demanding that advertisers yank their support from FOX’s “The Glenn Beck Show.” It appears that the boycott already is beginning to work. BlackAmericaWeb.com reports that so far three of the nightly show’s reported 200 companies have pulled their ads – NexisLexis-owned Lawyers.com, Proctor & Gamble and Progressive Insurance.  “We have no problems with freedom of speech,” James Rucker, executive director of 600,000-member Color of Change, told the Web site. “We do have problems with outright lies that play to the fears of many. What we are saying to them is that you serve a large population of people who find the message of Glenn Beck to be racially divisive. Do you want your brand associated with this type of message?”

First Pooch is Picked

In one of the most anticipated decisions to come out of the White House since the Obamas moved in, the family has finally decided what it will adopt as the “First Pooch.” In an interview with People magazine, First Lady Michelle Obama revealed that the family is looking for a rescue Portuguese Water Dog. The dog is due to arrive in the White House in April after daughters Sasha and Malia get back from their spring break trip, the publication reports. “Temperamentally they’re supposed to be pretty good. From the size perspective, they’re sort of middle of the road – it’s not small, but it’s not a huge dog,” Mrs. Obama said of the breed. “And the folks that we know who own them have raved about them. So that’s where we’re leaning.” More here.
 
 

NAACP Protests Post and FOX News
NAACP Branches across the nation participated in a “Day of Action” Thursday to protest the “racially insensitive” coverage at local FOX News affiliates and The New York Post and to demand greater diversity at those outlets and nationwide. “We believe that these stations, which are often good corporate citizens in our community, should lend their voice to ours and call for the parent corporation they are affiliated with to change its pattern of racially insensitive and incendiary coverage,” said NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. Both Fox News and the New York Post have come under criticism by a variety of media watchdog groups for racially insensitive and biased reporting. The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) gave Fox News their ‘Thumbs Down’ Award last year for its racially insensitive commentary and reporting along with a lack of diverse political correspondents during the election. Fox News was widely condemned for calling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” and referring to then-candidate Barack Obama’s fist bump with his wife a “terrorist fist jab.” In addition, for the past eight years, The New York Post is the only major newspaper that has refused to participate in the American Society of Newspaper Editors annual survey that tracks diversity at daily newspapers in the United States.  NAACP leaders again today demanded firing of the cartoon’s creator, Sean Delonas, and Editor in Chief Col Allen. “It outraged our members,” said Roger Vann, NAACP Vice President of Membership and Field Operations. “It compared African Americans to primates and it sullied police officers at a time when many communities are torn by suspicious police killings of young African American men.”
 

Mistrial in Case of Mississippi Mayor
On Tuesday, a U.S. court declared a mistrial in the case of the Jackson, Miss. mayor accused of leading a group of people to tear down a suspected crack house. The jury was unable to reach a verdict. In August of 2006, Jackson Mayor Frank Melton instructed a group of young people with hammers and sticks to destroy the home where he believed crack was being sold. Melton doesn’t deny that he damaged the duplex, and has argued that he was just keeping true to the promise he made to aggressively fight crime in 2005, when he won more than 80 percent of the vote. During his time in office, Melton distinguished himself by using a mobile police unit to conduct sweeps in poor neighborhoods, reports the news service. However, prosecutors accuse him of being drunk at the time of the crack house raid and have charged him with violating civil rights. After deliberating for five days, the jury couldn’t come to a decision and there will most likely be a new trial, reports Reuters. “We live to fight another day,” John Reeves, his attorney, said following the verdict. Melton was acquitted of state charges in 2007. A conviction in these proceedings would have cost Melton his job and he would be facing up to 25 years in jail.

 Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday that the nation was cowed into voting for Barack Obama for fear they’d be called “racists,” and he said he’d like nothing better than for America’s new president to “fail.” As Obama basks in showers of well wishes from the American public, Limbaugh, and FOX News host Sean Hannity could not conceal their anger over the nation’s choice of leader. Even prominent Republicans, “have laid down,” Limbaugh said. “They’re drinking the Kool- Aid, too. They have no guts to stand up for what their beliefs are because they’re afraid of criticism; they’re afraid of being called racists; they’re afraid of not having gotten with the program. So I shamelessly say, no, I want him to fail. …[W]hy would I want socialism to succeed?”  Read the rest here.