PressEthic

Barbara Walters recently visited 40/40 Jay-Z's club to interview him. Today she was on her show The View where a sort of condescending tone was taken. Walters said she took her rich friends to "this 40/40 downtown" and snapped her fingers trying to be all "hip-hoppy". She goes on to tell her anecdote and after she says all these wonderful things ends with "you know he used to be a drug dealer." Rosie O'Donnell kind of got annoyed and then Walters covered her tracks by saying what a wonderful man he was and how he rose from the gutter. I don't know the finances of these women, but I do know that Jay-Z sits on a $320 million dollar empire that he cultivated through business practices. I was offended by O'Donnell calling Jay-Z a kid... he is 37 years old. Then the entire group made generalizations about poor black kids and how even though Jay-Z has this scary past Barbara Walters deems him as "different" by saying, "but I really liked him. He is a nice, intelligent guy", as though she expected him to overtly ghetto and dumb. The ladies also touched on Jesse Jackson's boycott of the 7th season DVD of Seinfeld because of Kramer's racist outrage and Joy said she didn't agree because not everyone on the Seinfeld set is a racist. The fact that Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ" was deemed anti-semitic and boycotted just because of its content (with no knowledge of Gibson's anti-semitic tirade) was somehow a different issue. This comparison is like comparing apples to oranges because first the Kramer character doesn't have his own show or project to boycott- if he did I'm sure Jackson would have opted for that instead. The View isn't really media to us but it is to the people who are home at 11am everyday to watch it therefore they should be censored on what they do say because their line of talk today was offensive and displayed a nasty elitist attitude.