Don't Worry, Ladies. Tim Graham Is Here To Monitor Your Skin Tone Closely.

Tim Graham is the director of media analysis at the right wing Media Research Center, which was established to "prove" the media's liberal bias, usually by scolding the media for an unseemly devotion to facts and hesitation to promote vicious bigotry. Graham seems particularly incensed over the latter, assuming that everyone else secretly shares his obsession with maintaining rigid racial boundaries and that lack of media discourse about this must be the result of censorship. His latest Twitter missives involve complaining about MSNBC's new host Karen Finley, who he believes....fuck it, just read his horseshit.

Looking at his profile, I realized I've had to block him in the past for harassing me. Don't remember over what, but that's not a big surprise---unfortunately, it's such a common occurence it all bleeds together. These right wing dudes just can't help themselves; it's evidence that their ideology has roots in some weird psychosexual issues, for sure.

Anyway, this is hardly the first time that Graham has appointed himself the racial boundaries police. Not too long ago, he threw a fit because he felt that the media was ignoring the supposedly big story about Obama dating white women in the past.

 TIM GRAHAM, MEDIA RESEARCH CENTER: Where we have seen [David Marannis, author of Barack Obama: The Story] excerpts are in the magazine Vanity Fair. This apparently the deal he struck. That was where they talked about his white girlfriends in college. Which again you would think that would be a story that a news media that is so conscious about race seemed to not think that was an interesting development, that Obama had these white girlfriends. And how exactly would the black women feel about Obama having white girlfriends? Well they just weren't really... again, suddenly they are race neutral. They're colorblind.

The possibility that the rest of us really just aren't as titillated and offended at interracial dating as he seems to be---and thus don't think it's really a story in the same way that we think actual news is a story---doesn't even occur to him. Nor was the revelation "news" in even the most stretched definition of the word, because Obama had revealed this information in 1995 in his memoir, and the coverage of the Vanity Fair article was focused on other, previously non-disclosed details about Obama's youth.

Graham seems to think black women as a group disapprove of interracial dating. Sounds like projection to me, trying to make his own ugly feelings seem less ugly by claiming they belong to others. Here's the statistical reality:

Graham is a self-appointed media watchdog, and this entire debacle shows why the right simply can't perform that job in any meaningful sense. Both liberal and non-partisan media watchdog groups can monitor the media for distortion of facts and promotion of bigotry, but for the right, distortion of facts and bigotry are what they depend on to make their arguments.