King Of All Media

Here's a disturbing media story that, ironically, isn't getting much attention in the media.

Gayle King of CBS's morning-news program, "CBS This Morning," recently interviewed Women's National Basketball Association legend Lisa Leslie about Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash last month, and brought up a topic that, touchy as it was, was something King thought needed to be acknowledged.  She raised the rape allegations against Bryant from 2003.  It wasn't a large part of the interview with Leslie - it was actually pretty minuscule, I'm led to understand - but it was somehow used by CBS to promote the interview.

Well . . .you know all the sick death threats promising all sorts of gruesome forms of murder people who have criticized Rush Limbaugh have gotten?  Gayle King has been geting threats just as bad, if not worse, for bringing up Bryant's past.  One of those threats came from a fellow from California named Calvin Broadus.  Who?  That's Snoop Dogg's real and legal name. Once again, I am showing my utter disrespect for rap by calling a rapper by his given name.  But then, Broadus doesn't reserve respect from anyone.  He told King that he and his friends would come and get her if she didn't "back off," and on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough had to remind viewers that Broadus was once charged with murder in the 1990s.  (He was acquitted.)

This is hideous.  There is no excuse to attack an accomplished individual like King, and an accomplished black woman at that, with death threats.  Black women have had to deal with far more adversity than I ever will (ask my friend Karen Hunter), and no one - least of all Broadus - has any right to undermine King, who showed the same journalistic integrity with Lisa Leslie that she did when dealing with an unrepentant R. Kelly last month over his sex-abuse scandal (still ongoing) and should be taken seriously as a person who has lived up to her abilities as a journalist and as an interviewer.  The rape allegations against Bryant were too serious not to ignore, and King was right to deal with it.

As a white man, I owe a lot to black women I have met over the years.  At least two black women gave me employment.  A black female professor was my academic adviser in college.  Another black woman gave me a break by letting me interview her for an on spec profile article (which was the second article I ever got published).   I have wonderful personal relationships with other black women, the details of which are too personal to share here.  So watching what's happening to Gayle King makes me mad.  And that is why I wrote this post.

And this is also why I am adding myself to the number of people who have shared this hashtag: #IStandWithGayle.  

I haven't put Gayle King on my beautiful-women picture blog yet, but after this, you'd better believe that I'm going to do so in the near future.