More Race Cards being played

[Last Stand]

The McCain campaign is spreading its wings.

Today on WEEI Boston, one station in a network of 24-hr sports talk, the theme of the programming was racism in Boston. Dozens of angry callers expressed their opinion on an article by Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports. http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8670984/Will-non-white-free-agents-shun-the-Sox? It essentially states that the Red Sox have a racist organization.


"Of the Red Sox's current players in the ALCS, the only African- American is outfielder Coco Crisp.

snip

"Our player-personnel decision making is completely color-blind and always will be," Sox general manager Theo Epstein says.

snip

They (the Sox) have a shameful history of discrimination, one that their present ownership group has tried to address. And a perception has long existed among some African-American athletes that Boston is hostile to players who are not white."


It is fair to say that the Sox were overtly racist in the years of the Yawkey ownership. But that changed. In recent years, they have been baseball's winningest team (since '04) with rosters of varying make-ups, including Korean, Dominican, Japanese, Venezuelan, Afro-American and American Indian. In the spring, Ken Rosenthal called this year's Sox team a wonderful melting pot of talent. Theo Epstein, the GM, and John Henry, the owner, are as liberal as they come.

The timing of this article and the WEEI programming is obvious. It runs in lockstep with the racially charged politics of the McCain campaign. WEEI is owned by Enterpol, a mega-media company who owns primarily RW outlets. Of the 4 Boston-area stations they own, 3 of them have substantial, regular Right Wing programming, including the sports station. Hearing caller after caller feel angry and offended by the Fox article, and then hearing the WEEI hosts deny any political motivation by their station or the Fox article, was infuriating.