Several members of the Boston Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People protested outside the Fox 25 studios on Elm Street yesterday morning.They also delivered a letter expressing outrage at a cartoon published by the New York Post, which they say depicts President Barack Obama as a gorilla who has been shot by two white police officers.Fox and the Post are both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Murdoch offered an apology for the cartoon, but the protesters said it wasn’t enough.
“As far as I’m concerned the apology was totally unacceptable,” said Mary Adams, an executive board member of the Boston Branch of the NAACP.“He needs to outline clear steps and then follow through to make sure it doesn’t happen ever again.”
The protest was part of a national effort in which NAACP delievered letters to 90 Fox affiliates across the country demanding that the newspaper identify measures to end what Adams called “a pattern of insensitivity.”No one from the studio would come out to accept the letter, and none of the protesters were allowed inside.Instead, Boston branch president Karen Payne left it with the security guard at the front gate.
Rev. Karen Peters, the white pastor of the UnitedMethodistChurch in Roslindale and a NAACP member, called the cartoon “extremely provocative” and “an invitation to harm our president.”
Fred Ross drove from Portsmouth, New Hamphire to be a part of the protest.He said he thought the days when racially inflammatory depictions could be considered acceptable were past.
“They try to get away with it by saying it’s only a cartoon,” Ross said, “but it’s not just a cartoon.”
Ross said he believed a lack of diversity at the New York Post made editors there insensitive to racial slights.He could not offer any data to back up his claim of a lack of diversity, but Payne interjected that the Post has not issued a report on the diversity of its staff to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in eight years.
