The people Obama should speak to next!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2014

Perhaps with O’Reilly’s assistance: Yesterday, President Obama announced an initiative designed to help black youth.

In the New York Times, Michael Shear quotes the president:

OBAMA (2/27/14): He called the challenge of ensuring success for young men of color a “moral issue for our country” as he ticked off the statistics: black boys who are more likely to be suspended from school, less likely to be able to read, and almost certain to encounter the criminal justice system as either a perpetrator or a victim.

“We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is,” Mr. Obama told an audience of business leaders, politicians, philanthropists, young black men from a Chicago support program, and Mr. Martin’s parents. “It’s like a cultural backdrop for us in movies, in television. We just assume, of course it’s going to be like that.”

“These statistics should break our hearts,” he added. “And they should compel us to act.”

At one point in his remarks, Obama semi-joked about the sweep of the program’s appeal as he cited two of his guests. “If I can persuade, you know, Sharpton and O’Reilly to be in the same meeting,” he said, “then it means that there are people of good faith who want to get some stuff done.”

Mr. O and Reverend Al were there, black and white together! But if Obama wants to encourage other folk to get off their keisters and care about this, he should speak to the pseudo-liberal stars found on The One True Channel.

As we’ve often noted, you have to shoot and kill black kids to get MSNBC to take interest. As a general matter, the channel focuses on the rights desired by people of their own class.

Those rights are important. But manifestly, MSNBC’s exalted hosts don’t give a fig about the interests of our “underclass” youth.

We’re so old that we can remember when the problems of “inner city schools” occupied a major place in the liberal playbook. Those days are long gone.

Are black boys “more likely to be suspended from school, less likely to be able to read?” When’s the last time you saw a discussion of low-income schools on MSNBC?

(A bit of advice: Start your search at “never.” You’ll be pretty close.)

MSNBC has made it clear—it doesn’t bother with black kids. Maybe Obama should take O’Reilly and have him yell at Rachel, Chris and Lawrence.

Let’s take an updated look at the record: Personally, we’re not gigantic fans of Diane Ravitch. But among liberals, she’s the current state of the art concerning low-income schools, and she knows about a wide range of public school issues.

In the last two years, according to Nexis, Ravitch has appeared on The Ed Show twice, in each case for an extremely short segment. She appeared on All In once, for a fairly short segment.

That’s the channel’s body of work over the past two years.

For what it’s worth, NBC News has been hopelessly devoted to “education reform” over the past five years or so. Who knows? MSNBC’s liberal stars may be bowing to the preferences of the corporate suits.