Sklar: “If 2009 Isn’t the Year of the Black Media Star, Then we are All Doing Something Wrong”

Rachel Sklar, formerly of The Huffington Post and now of Abrams Research, takes a look back at ’08 (and a look forward) in a column on The Daily Beast.

One area is the African American media landscape. “Considering what a watershed year it was racially, surprisingly few new African-American stars emerged,” she writes. “The networks relied, for the most part, on the names they already knew…If 2009 isn’t the year of the black media star, then we are all doing something wrong.”

And with the Obama-media correlation, there’s also one regarding Clinton and the media. “We are so not ready for a female president. By ‘we’ I mean the media, whose stunning mishandling of the gender politics of the 2008 race meant that no one would even admit there might be a sexism problem until it was too late for Hillary Clinton — and just in time for Sarah Palin,” writes Sklar.

Other topics discussed include two undercovered (or “undernews”) areas — the war in Iraq and John Edwards.

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