Soledad O’Brien has “perfect genes”
CVK
Back in October, we told you about an interview that Soledad O’Brien did in which she discussed what it was like growing up mixed. Now along comes a… not-so-sophisticated interview with her, to say the least. I’ll let blogger TheThink handle this one. Below is what he wrote on his blog about the story:
Here’s an idea: anyone who makes their money as a journalist should be fired for writing at a middle school level.
I just read the beginning of a “news” article that made me want to dry heave out the breakfast I didn’t eat this morning. A lady named Yvonne Wingett of the The Arizona Republic conducted a 45-minute interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that seemed less like an interview and more like the ramblings of a teenage teeny bopper keen on dry humping Polaroids of celebrities.
Wingett begins her unworthy news article with the following:
If you’re anything like me in the morning, you race around to make espresso and straighten your hair, with one ear on your cellphone, the other on CNN’s Soledad O’Brien.” — Yvonne Wingett
Sorry Wingett, I’ve got what amounts to no more than a buzz cut and I don’t drink espresso. It should come as no surprise that your approach to news is haphazard considering you don’t even pay full attention to it. Wingett continues:
As co-host of American Morning, O’Brien is one of few Latinas in broadcast news. I’ve watched her cover some of this generation’s most important stories, from Hurricane Katrina to the tsunami in Thailand.
And she looks so good doing it. As the daughter of immigrants (her father is an Australian of Irish ancestry, her mother is a Black Cubana) she has perfect - and I mean perfect – genes.
She is, in my mind, the Penelope Cruz of journalism. I caught up with her last weekend while she was in town to speak at the American Medical Association’s Medical Communications Conference in downtown Phoenix. I was so star-struck, I can’t remember the first few minutes of our conversation. But here’s part of our 45-minute conversation…”
To Wingett: Next time, try getting some real material from Soledad (like more details about her Cynthia McKinney pimp down) instead of pimping out the perfection of her mixed Latina genes. Also, you might want to step your game up when it comes to asking questions.
“Q.You look fabulous always. Favorite designer?”
Next…
Unlisted wrote:
Sorry, but can you all tell me what a “pimp down” is?
Posted 12 May 2006 at 1:11 pm ¶
P.Moore wrote:
“Next time, try getting some real material from Soledad (like more details about her Cynthia McKinney pimp down)”
I used this in passing (sarcasm) to allude to the fact that O’Brian had just recently finished an interview with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (the lady who got angry on a Capitol Hill police officer). In the interview, which I believe I linked, O’Brien asks McKinney a lot of questions that McKinney evades. Soledad kept asking her simple questions and at one point said “I just want to know what happened.” Simple enough, yet McKinney (in my opinion) evaded every single question. Thus, a media “pimp down,” in my jargon, is when a journalist, reporter, or similar media outlet pretty much PWNs (you can urbandictionary this one to save me the time) a person that they are interviewing. I believe McKinney racialized the entire episode; she didn’t have to turn it into being about her “hair-do”. India.Arie’s latest single already has that covered. Kidding. “Pimp down” in the sense that I used it means nothing more than putting someone in their place. O’Brien is a woman of color; McKinney is also. I was glad she said what a lot of people of color (like myself) were thinking about the episode. Anyway…
-P
The guy who wrote the O’Brien post.
Posted 12 May 2006 at 2:27 pm ¶
Unlisted wrote:
Thanks, and that urbandictionary should help me to decipher more slang which for me is getting more complicated seemingly by the day. Still even after looking it up can’t follow how ‘PWN’ apparently made it into the urban jargon
Posted 12 May 2006 at 3:12 pm ¶
P.Moore wrote:
“Pwned” (via urbandictionary)
MEANING:
The past tense of the word “pwn,” which means “to kick the ass of (an opponent).”
Posted 12 May 2006 at 3:27 pm ¶
Charlette wrote:
I agree, learned in first year journalism class der out of high school that talking about a person’s race or how pretty they are is not journalism besides this Wingett person talked more about herself than her interviewee. BOOOOOOO
Posted 12 May 2006 at 4:40 pm ¶
Unlisted wrote:
P Moore:
Great Blog by the way…in my favorites now
Posted 12 May 2006 at 5:28 pm ¶
P.Moore wrote:
Unlisted, thanks.
I love the community I’ve found through Jen & Carmen’s blog; they are a big reason I’ve been motivated to write about certain things. In that sense, they are the multiracial mentors I never had *sniff sniff*. Okay. Stopping…
Perhaps in the year to come we will see more ‘mixed’ blogs out there with good stuff. There’s no reason we can’t have diverse opinions just like everyone else.
P
Posted 12 May 2006 at 6:04 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:
Had to add that I first saw “PWN” as a very geeky very smart series of LJ entries that put English and early US history into modern slang and netspeak.
According to Wikepedia, ““Pwn3d” derived originally from the famous first person shooter Counter-Strike in the mid to late 1990s. A player on the game misspelled “owned” and instead spelt “pwn3d” pressing the “3” key instead of the “e” key and the “P” instead of the “O”. This spelling was found to be funny among players and it stuck. The word is still used widely today as well. Other spellings started such as “pwn” and “pwnd”.
So that may be how it got into urban speak - through video games…
Posted 19 May 2006 at 9:00 am ¶