ABC anchor Carole Simpson was careful to label Charles Pickering, Bush’s judicial nominee now being held up by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, as a “conservative” and a man in a soundbite tagged him a “right wing Republican,” but she refused to apply any ideological label on his opponents. Instead, she euphemistically cited “a coalition of fifty civil rights, human rights and women’s groups.”
Simpson began the February 24 World News Tonight/Sunday piece by showing a clip of Pickering before the Judiciary Committee as he insisted: “I have a record of standing up for equal protection, respecting the rule of law.”
Simpson countered: “But critics of the conservative Republican strongly disagree. Among them, the NAACP.”
After letting NAACP President Kweisi Mfume denounce Bush’s nominee for a seat on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, for “a lack of tolerance,” Simpson recited the issues which upset his critics. Simpson then ran a soundbite of White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez who suggested the “people who know him best” in his hometown support him.
Simpson noted that Pickering is from Laurel, Mississippi “a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1950s and 60s,” but she acknowledged that local blacks “respect” Pickering for testifying against a Klan leader accused of the firebombing murder of a civil rights leader.
Larry Thomas, a pharmacist, for instance, argued: “I still view Charles Pickering as a right wing Republican, but then on the other hand, I saw him open his arms to try and embrace change compatible to both races in south Mississippi.”
Simpson avoided the liberal label: “But for a coalition of fifty civil rights, human rights and women’s groups, that is not enough.”
Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP: “While there are some people on the ground in Mississippi who say, well perhaps he’s changed, perhaps he has, but I don’t think we have the wherewithal and the freedom to run that risk because once the judge is there there’s nothing that can remove him except death.”
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
