Misdirected 'apology' compounds racial gaffe

AMERICA AT LARGEThe veteran TV reporter Bonnie Bernstein has struggled to explain away an outrageous piece of stereotyping, writes George Kimball

BONNIE BERNSTEIN is, at 37, a 15-year veteran of the television business who has spent much of that time on the national stage. She has worked everything from the ESPN anchor desk in Connecticut to her current role as a sideline reporter covering for that network and its parent company, ABC.

A magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland (where she had been an All-American member of the gymnastics team), she more recently branched out as an owner of Velvet Hammer, a consulting firm specialising in polishing the media skills of aspiring broadcast journalists.

Somewhere along the line, however, she seems to have skipped the lesson about keeping one's mouth shut when one doesn't know what one is talking about.

Appearing as a guest on ESPN radio's nationally broadcast Mike and Mike in the Morning programme last Wednesday, a day before the National Basketball Association draft would take place in New York, Bernstein managed to segue into an unprovoked rant in which she stereotypically described Palestinians as suicide-bombers-in-training.

It was, if not dangerous, at the very least incredibly stupid, but, remarkably, she still has a job this morning.

The topic under discussion that morning did not seem particularly controversial.

In an attempt to curb the legions of youngsters attempting to jump straight into the NBA without the benefit of college experience, the league and the National Collegiate Athletic Association recently worked out an agreement that, in order to be eligible for the draft, players must be at least 19 years of age and/or at least a year removed from high school.

The intent was to ensure even 18-year-old superstars would benefit from at least a year on a college campus before joining the pro ranks. Incorporating the language into the latest collective-bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players effectively discouraged the possibility of a court challenge on constitutional grounds.

The morning Bonnie dropped in to chat with co-hosts Mike Golic and Mike Greenburg, the topic du jour was a lad named Brandon Jennings, an 18-year-old basketball player at Oak Hill in Virginia.

Generally acclaimed to be the best point guard in the country emerging from this year's high-school crop, Jennings has committed to attending the University of Arizona - or had, until he learned that he might be academically ineligible to play at that institution of higher learning next year.

Jennings was revealed to be exploring, as an alternative, the possibility of signing with a team in Europe next season, which, while in keeping with the letter of the NBA's new regulation, would clearly be in contravention of the spirit in which it was adopted.

Asked her views on l'affaire Jennings, Bernstein leapt into an unscripted diatribe in which she likened pressuring young basketball players toward the professional game to what she apparently considers the Palestinian national pastime - the grooming of prospective terrorists.

A verbatim transcript of Bernstein's faux pas seems to reveal that she knew she was treading on dangerous ground the minute she opened her mouth, but apparently couldn't curb her enthusiasm:

"It's sort of like, you know, and this isn't . . . I'm prefacing this by saying this is in no way an analogy to sports, because I know we live in a hypersensitive society, but I remember a while ago I was reading an article in the New York Times about Palestinian suicide bombers, and I just remember being struck by the notion that from the point of birth, people in Palestine are taught to think that dying in the name of God is a good thing.

"They grow up wanting to be suicide bombers," maintained Bernstein. "So, bringing it back to sports again, I'm not making the comparison or the analogy, but if a young, talented basketball player is being told at an early age that they (sic) are destined, is it a good thing to focus on basketball and not worry about what's going on in the classroom?"

Ms Bernstein's imprudent remarks produced the expected firestorm of protest, most notably from Arab anti-defamation watchdog groups, and the National Arab American Journalists Association in particular.

What the outraged parties seemed to miss is that in lumping together the lunatic fringes involved in both pursuits, Ms Bernstein had managed to malign not only Palestinians but basketball parents as well. Not all suicide bombers are Palestinians. (Indeed, not all of them are necessarily even Arabs.)

We've got some other news that may come as a surprise for Ms Bernstein: Not all sports parents with misplaced priorities live in the ghetto.

The typical Palestinian parent does not "programme" (Bonnie's word, not mine) his children to be murderers. The typical American parent does not programme his children to be millionaire basketball players, either, but in her eagerness to liken one to the other, Bernstein wound up trivialising both.

Precisely this sort of careless racial pandering has cost at least a few of her (male) broadcast colleagues their jobs.

Less than six months ago, when the Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman suggested his PGA rivals might want to lynch Tiger Woods in a back alley, her employer suspended her without pay for two weeks.

Bernstein appears to have escaped with barely a reprimand, apart from being ordered to tape a half-hearted apology that was playing over the ESPN airwaves within hours.

"In hindsight I realise that it was simply a mistake to bring Palestine into the discussion, and for that I apologise," she said. "Religion and politics have no place on public airwaves at a sports network."

It strikes me that this ostensibly heartfelt apology missed the point completely. What Bernstein had actually said (as distinct from what she may have been thinking) in her earlier analogy had no more to do with religion or politics than it did with basketball. Rather, it represented racial stereotyping at its basest level.

That she chose to ascribe religious significance to her gaffe, however, may be revealing about her own thought processes. Did she simply say "Palestinian", for instance, when what she really meant was "Muslim"?

What seems plain enough from the wording of her "apology" is that she did not comprehend this when she first opened her mouth, and she still doesn't get it now.