Michelle Obama, Fox News, and baby mamas

What happened

Fox News came under fire from liberal bloggers Thursday after the cable channel displayed text under an image of Michelle Obama identifying her as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s “baby mama.” (The New York Times’ The Opinionator blog) Fox said the producer who chose the wording used "poor judgment." (Politico) Earlier, Fox News’ E.D. Hill was forced to apologize after saying that a fist-bump between Barack and Michelle Obama might have been a “terrorist fist jab.” (Chicago Tribune’s The Swamp blog)

What the commentators said

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Where do you even start” when criticizing Fox's “baby mama” slur? said Joan Walsh in Salon. Do you explain that "baby mama" is an African-American slang term “for the unmarried mother of a man's child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend?" Is Fox "racist, or just clueless?”

There’s no reason to go “apoplectic,” said James Joyner in the blog Outside the Beltway. Mrs. Obama herself has referred to her husband as her “baby’s daddy,” and the term is now commonly used in the media to refer to white celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Justin Timberlake. This is just another example of “manufactured outrage.”

Get used to it, said Sam Schechner and Rebecca Dana in The Wall Street Journal. "In a campaign that includes the first viable African-American presidential candidate, the lines of appropriate speech have become fuzzy." And a "broad network of self-appointed watchdogs" is ready to pounce every time the media step out of line.

Nothing will stop the coming summer of attacks on Michelle Obama, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Now that Hillary Clinton is out of the race, Republicans “can turn their full attention to demonizing” the woman at the side of the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. There are “creepy” Web sites dedicated to painting Mrs. Obama as “an angry black woman.”

And there you have the Democrats’ defense, said commentator Michelle Malkin in her blog. Michelle Obama isn’t getting half the grief that Laura Bush does, yet liberals want the world to think “we are all somehow colluding in unfair and ‘brutal’ attacks on Barack Obama’s wife because we express profound disagreement with her public statements and policy pronouncements on the campaign trail.”