Philly.com's Christine Flowers

When Christine Flowers isn't playing contrary to logic on Philadelphia's local incarnation of the McLaughlin Group, she's keeping the lights on in the Inquirer's new headquarters by spreading condescending visceral across the virtual pages of Philly.com.

I like smart conservatives. They understand what they believe and why and they respect those who differ. Like intelligent liberals, they know that for a democracy to succeed, a broad range of beliefs need to exist to balance our extremes. I also like stupid conservatives. Like stupid liberals, they're too uninformed to really understand their beliefs, beliefs that are often malleable. Sarah Palin actually seems like a really nice person.

I even find crazy conservatives entertaining. Michele Bachmann and Ted Cruz - despite the billions they cost the country - are hilarious. They keep SNL on the air.

Christine Flowers is none of these things. She's a low budget Anne Counter. A muckraker. She's simply a contrarian. It's not hard to imagine Christine Flowers reporting out of Little Rock with the exact opposite agenda simply because people are more likely to ignore articles that blow smoke up their asses. 

She routinely cites her religious conviction as the foundation for her personal beliefs, as if anyone wants to know where a journalist goes to church. The reason we care about the foundational beliefs of our leaders is because they make our laws. Flowers is a reporter, not a politician, yet she arrogantly assumes her audience is more interested in her own beliefs than those of her subjects.

Even the most opinionated editorials maintain focus, but Flowers is primarily interested in telling us about herself.

Recently she interviewed Rep. Brian Sims, the state's first openly gay Congressman who's grabbed national attention by challenging just about everything that's wrong with politics.

The headline of her article grants Sims a pass as a liberal rival while the article reeks of self promotion and condescension, as if she is somehow Pennsylvania's political litmus test.

Instead of simply reporting on her interview with Sims, she seems to believe that she is allowing him to do his job, that her approval is needed.

She seems to think that momentarily pausing her xenophobic rhetoric is a humanitarian effort, but in doing so only makes her prejudice more obvious.

She might as well say, "I like Brian, he's gay but he doesn't really act gay."

I'm not painting an extreme, and Flowers' bigotry isn't just documented in the gay community. This is the journalist who called America's first Indian-American Miss America, Nina Davuluri, a "Miss Special Interest Group," callously referring to Davuluri's notion of the American Pie as the "Indian-American Samosa."

She even went as far as comparing her own Italian-American heritage to Davuluri's, as if a white woman named Flowers is being routinely stopped by the TSA.

Flowers concluded her article on Davuluri by criticizing Miss America's inspirational comments to minority children. Then Flowers expressed contempt for bigots, thus attempting to absolve herself of any accountability stating, "a plague on both your houses."

If you're going to judge people who comment on their own ethnicity or sexual orientation, stand by your judgments.

She ended her article on her interview with Sims somewhat more amicably, offering him an unsolicited and irrelevant endorsement, "Sims...gained many admirers, including yours truly."

Perhaps there's hope that someone so enamored with Sims' empathetic outlook may find a bit of her own.

How the Media Missed Miss Amercia

When Miss New York, Nina Davuluri won the Miss America crown, most of America missed the point.

I'm not talking about all the racist trolls baiting the internet from the anonymity they found under a bridge. BuzzFeed has done a fine job calling them out by their Twitter names likely to bring them fifteen minutes of fame before their teachers and parents find out what they've been saying.

Sure, some will get support from the redder necked parts of the hate states, but for every nasty comment retweeted or recounted in an article, there are hundreds of comments calling them out as the disgusting bags of garbage that they are.

What I'm talking about is the media itself and the fact that most outlets have decided to highlight the hate in their comment feeds rather than discuss who Nina Davuluri actually is.

Let's face it, a lot of us didn't follow the pageant. Had Miss (some white girl) won, many of us would have awoken Monday morning unaware that the pageant had even taken place.

Instead we woke to Facebook comments and articles all decrying the seemingly endless anger over Davuluri's win. Many nameless commenters called her "Arab," as if that should matter. Some even called her a terrorist. According to CNN, it would seem that most of America was wondering why a "foreigner" won Miss America. The last thing any media outlet bothered to tell us anything about was Nina Davuluri, the woman who won. 

Our own Philadelphia Inquirer called her win a "controversial reign."

What's controversial? Did the audience at the pageant stand and boo? Was the election rigged? Is the fact that she looks like millions of other ethnically diverse Americans controversial?

Or is the fact that the media allows a platform for race baiting, encouraging comments as a means to sell advertising, controversial? Is the fact that media outlets are pretending to be dumfounded that these racists exist controversial?

The media is certainly fanning the flames to their own advantage.

One local columnist went as far as to criticize Davuluri for some of the comments she made following her win, paraphrasing the newly crowned beauty queen's remarks towards children who "finally, would feel as if they had a piece of the Indian-American samosa simply because the lady in the sash looked like them."

Christine Flowers of the Daily News actually said that, and the newspaper printed it.

Flowers went as far as to compare her own Italian-American identity - in Philadelphia -  to that of an ethnicity many people, if trollish comments are to be believed, equate with terrorism.

There's a reason Davuluri's victory is significant, and that reason is evident in the comments on Philly.com, CNN.com, and Twitter. Those children she's speaking to, those who face that kind of hatred and bigotry in the classroom, are what makes her victory significant.

To decry Davuluri's message to children who face hate every day, hate they don't even understand, as some kind of reverse racism is to embrace the fallacy that reverse racism exists. To claim that being Italian-American creates a common bond with those institutionally discriminated against displays a complete lack of empathy and understanding of the world we live in, particularly when placed against the backdrop of the hateful comments levied against Davuluri.

Of all professions, these are things a reporter should understand.

As a Greek-American raised in a hate state I merely struggled with a last name few people knew how to pronounce. For Flowers, a Sopranos joke here and there cannot possibly translate into the kind of prejudice Indian-Americans, Middle Eastern-Americans, and African-Americans face everywhere, every day.

Get real. The fallacy of a post-racial America has been exhausted, disproven by the comments below any online article in the world, any article a journalist like Christine Flowers has ever posted.

That's why Nina Davuluri's win is significant. That's why her message to the young girls she understands, sympathizes with, and relates to, is even more significant.

And that's why journalists like Flowers need a reality check, or need to pass the story to someone who gets it. Someone who can tell us something about Nina Davuluri instead of using her job as a place to explore her own insecurities.