Fox News gingerly criticizes Hillary Clinton over 'racist' Bill de Blasio skit

Fox News isn't an editorial monolith, but the network generally disparages political correctness and what its personalities call exaggerated sensitivity over race and gender (see, for example, Bill O'Reilly's comments Monday night that "many" young black people "are ill-educated and have tattoos on their foreheads"). So Greta Van Susteren treaded carefully on Tuesday's On The Record when she criticized Hillary Clinton for a recent skit in which New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio joked about "C.P. time," a reference to "colored people time" and an old dig against black Americans.

"Look, I don't think either one of these people are racist," she told guest Rev. Michel Faulkner, a black Republican running for New York City mayor, but their remarks showed "bad judgment, bad humor." Faulkner, who hopes to challenge de Blasio, wasn't shy about calling the skit "insensitive, to say the least, and racist to an extreme." But the real racism, he said, was what he called their "pandering" to black voters. Van Susteren said what she found most disturbing is that the skit was scripted, asking: "How can these two make it right? I mean, we don't want to add fuel to a fire." Faulkner had a match. As "supposedly champions of equal rights and fairness," he said, "they should have known better. I mean, Bill de Blasio is married to an African American woman," and this joke "was out of bounds." Van Susteren replied that she hoped "we can, sort of, take the steam out of this one."

In an interview with Cosmopolitan on Tuesday, Clinton was asked about the skit and disavowed responsibility: "Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio's skit. He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he's already talked about." On CNN Monday night, de Blasio said that "the whole idea was to do the counterintuitive by saying 'cautious politician time,'" and "I think people are missing the point here."

Subscribe to 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