Washington Post media reporter Erik Wemple reports Wednesday that despite MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry chastising a Republican guest for calling Paul Ryan a “hard worker,” Harris-Perry uses the term “hard work” all the time.
Harris-Perry told a guest to be “super careful when we use the language ‘hard worker.’ Because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like.”
But Wemple found many examples of her using the term herself:
- February 21- Harris-Perry tells NBC correspondent Kerry Sanders during her coverage of a blizzard that she was “doing the hard work today while the rest of us are warm and toasty right here in 30 Rock. But enjoy the ice sculptures.” (“Surely it’s not the sort of hard work required to … pick cotton,” Wemple asks coyly).
- September 6- “What I don’t want to miss is that policing is in fact actually hard work, and there are things that make policing a more dangerous or less dangerous job,” Harris-Perry says during a segment on the racial dimensions of policing. “And I guess, part of what I’m interested in is, what those sort of facts are, what actually makes it harder or more dangerous to be a police officer.
- August 30- Harris-Perry says that Ben Carson didn’t find success because of his work ethic: “I think that hard work is necessary but insufficient condition for success. Which is simply to say, must we work hard? Absolutely. But does hard work necessarily lead to success? No. And so I always want to think about the other side.”
- May 3- Harris-Perry praises a group of Baltimore teenagers, none of whom were sharecroppers. “Thank you for the work that you are doing on the ground there. Stay safe, stay positive, and keep doing the hard work.”
Wemple also noted several times that guests have used the term in front of Harris-Perry without facing her wrath, and one instance in which she played video of Hillary Clinton using the term without commenting on it.
[h/t Washington Post]
[Image via screengrab]
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