After Morgan Freeman’s comments about Black History Month, Baltimore Sun reporter Dan Thanh Dang did a story about reaction to his comments. The article titled “Some blacks take Freeman to task over CBS interview”, is exactly what the title implies. A review of Blacks who disagree with Mr. Freeman. Ms. Dan Thanh Dang interviewed some who agree with Mr. Freeman, but failed to include their comments in the article. (Her first name caused me to think she was a man, but I learned she is indeed female.) In this post, I mentioned that people like La Shawn Barber were interviewed and all her comments were left out of the article.

In the entire article, these are the only words I could find that show anyone supports Mr. Freeman at all:

As you can see, only the later part of that first sentence mentions anything about supporters, along with the second sentence shown above. In a 686 word article, the supporters of Mr. Freeman’s comments were given a whopping 37 words. That’s a little over 5%. If that is a balanced report, then to be balanced is to be Liberal.

In an effort to get to the bottom of this, I contacted Ms. Thanh Dang. Although I was pretty steamed when I initially contacted her, I just had to know why she would fail to include any comments from people who agree with Mr. Freeman. Below is the initial message I sent to her, keep in mind that I assumed at the time she was a man.

Ms. Thanh Dang was kind enough to respond to my tirade. Which I must say was a very gracious gesture on her part. That initial response resulted in her and I sending several e-mails to each other. Eventually she requested to discuss things via phone and we talked things over. Unfortunately The Baltimore Sun will not allow her to give permission to post any of her e-mailed responses. I was hoping that this post would simply be my initial e-mail to her, her response and me simply saying that I disagree with her. But given that was not allowed and I will not post her communication to me without expressed permission, I ended up offering a lot of my thoughts on the article in this post. Basically if I could have shown her e-mail to me here, nothing you read before my quoted e-mail would be in this post. But I feel the newspaper’s reluctance to allow a public response is just another example of bias. I’ve told Ms. Thanh Dang my feelings about things and although we disagree, we were able to have a very cordial conversation about it all. I only wish I could have posted her response here, given I would have liked for her side to be told, no matter how much I disagree. I have no desire to leave out her statements, although I’ve seen comments given to her omitted.

It would be good when an instance of bias is cited, that the media outlet could respond more publicly. I get the feeling that Ms. Thanh Dang cares about accusations of bias, but her employer probably could care less. And although I feel there is bias, I appreciate the response just the same.

I’ve told her that in order for this to be cleared up and prove that there was no bias, another report would need to be published. One that allows supporters of Mr. Freeman to speak about this matter. To speak about it and have our quotes included in the article. She mentioned that she may contact folks like myself and Ms. Barber for future articles. I guess it’s OK to tell you that much about her response .

There has been vast coverage of Ms. Thanh Dang’s story in the Conservative Blogosphere. Mark Tapscott offers insight into how stories are “cherry picked”. Given Ms. Barber mentioned how baited the questions were, I think he’s spot on! Hat tip to blog The Real Ugly American for that find. Blog Narcissistic views on News/Politics offered criticism of the article. Hat tip to blog Booker Rising for that find. Also, La Shawn’s post was cited by Conservative Blog Super Woman Michelle Malkin. Captain Ed over at Captain’s Quarters called the omission of La Shawn’s comments “A True Case Of Discrimination”. The omission was also cited by Lorie Byrd at PoliPundit. Blog The Land of Ozz also offers commentary.