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Baby mama, uh, drama

There are a couple of things worth noting about Fox News’ too-cute-by half labeling of Michelle Obama as “Obama’s baby mama” in a caption yesterday.

The context of the caption, framing as it did a discussion of right-wing attacks against Mrs. Obama on a network hostile to Democrats generally, works to undermine attempts by Michelle Malkin - one of the two personalities engaged in the discussion - to frame the use of the term as innocuous (via a quoted article on such terms from Salon ).

As for the defense itself - the use of the phrase having evolved from specific racialized origins to more common and race/class neutral parlance - it falls apart once you consider that word meanings don’t change uniformly across all of society, and that the tensions between meaning and usage are never ignored. The celebrity-entertainment complex, to coin another clumsy term, is indeed in the business of co-opting cultural artifacts, but it does so in full knowledge of the origins of that element. It plays off that origin even while using terms in new contexts - and it does so in the post-Seinfeld certainty that readers and viewers will recognize the irony on some level, that they will “get it.”

Innocuous perhaps for pop songs and movies, but wildly inappropriate - as Malkin all but admits (”I don’t know if the caption writer was making a lame attempt to be hip, clueless about the original etymology of the phrase, or both”) when it comes to a purported news organization.

Once you stop viewing Fox News as an actual news organization, however, and see it instead as a Republican 527, then it all makes sense.

Regarding lame attempts to be hip: If Michelle Obama’s last name was Smith, or McWilliams, or Devereaux, this kerfluffle could never have taken place. “Devereaux’s baby mama” just doesn’t scan all that well.

That’s Fox for you - always going after the lowest-hanging fruit. But if not that, then, then doubtless something else. Fox leaves no opportunity overlooked when it comes to degrading its own role in the public discourse.

Update: Wonder if Malkin will change her stance on the “baby mama” caption now that a Fox vice president has called the frame an exercise in “poor judgment.”

“A producer on the program exercised poor judgment in using this chyron during the segment,” Fox’s Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine said in a statement to Politico.

In addition to being insulting, the phrase “baby mama” is also inaccurate. The Urban Dictionary defines “baby mama” as”the mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.”

Although Shine doesn’t name anyone responsible, the show’s producer is Jessica Herzberg. A Fox staffer said that others internally were bothered by describing the potential first lady and very accomplished women — as the senator’s “baby mama.”

Unfortunately for the network, this comes just days after Fox’s E.D. Hill addressed her use of the phrase “terrorist fist jab” on-air in reference to the famous Michelle-Barack fist bump (or pound) made just before his celebratory speech in St. Paul.

Obscure word of the day: chyron - television graphics that occupy the lower area of the screen, also called “lower third.”

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