Its a racist white guy with a gun! (Except its not.)

This is absolutely unbelievable. I really cannot believe they actually put this on the air.

Go view the video for yourself over at the Sundries Shack or at Moe’s but the sum of it is that MSNBC shows a close up cropped view of a well dressed man with an AR-15 strapped to his back at a rally. The voice over says

And the reason we’re talking about this, a lot of talk here, Dylan, because people feel like, yes, there are Second Amendment rights for sure but also there are questions about whether this has racial overtones. I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists or to their legs.

The big problem is that the guy in the video is black as seen in CNN footage of the same event. The MSNBC video is cropped super close and doesn't show his hands or face.

I usually give the benefit of the doubt that a lot of the media’s bias stems mainly from their own world view – i.e. “I’m in the middle, I’m not on the left!” but this is such shoddy reporting that it has to be deliberate and is ultimately very irresponsible for injecting a level of concern and fear into a debate that need not be there.

(HT: Radley Balko)