(Image Source: The White House)

BY EVAN BUSH

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

Critics are asking is it racism, accuracy, or a bit of both? In a controversial transcript from President Obama’s weekend speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, an Associated Press writer dropped President Obama’s Gs.

C-SPAN has an excerpt.
 

“’Shake it off. Stop complainin'. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'. We are going to press on. We've got work to do.’"

And here’s MSNBC showing what it looks like in the Associated Press quote:  

“This is how the AP transcribed that same section. ’Shake it off. Stop complainin' -- apostrophe. 'Stop grumblin' -- apostrophe. 'Stop cryin' -- apostrophe. We are going to press on. We have work to do.’"

Karen Hunter, an MSNBC analyst, took issue with that.

“I think it’s inherently racist to do something like that. And I think that for you to sit here and defend it as if it’s cool, when you know what they were doing, to me, is almost offensive. ... I teach a journalism class, and I tought my students to fix people’s grammar, because you don’t want them to sound ignorant, right? And for them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.”

Mark Smith, the Capitol Hill reporter behind the transcription-in-question tells Mediaite, he intentionally dropped Mr. Obama’s G’s for a reason and it’s not racism:

“Normally, I lean toward the clean-it-up school of quote transcribing – for everyone. But in this case, the President appeared to be making such a point of dropping Gs, and doing so in a rhythmic fashion, that for me to insert them would run clearly counter to his meaning. I believe I was respecting his intent in this. Certainly disrespect was the last thing I intended.”

Conservative blog Hot Air weighs in, saying the AP was giving an accurate transcription and that it highlights what the blog calls “pandering” to the black community:

“The allegation of racism is preposterous. The president went out of his way last night to sound more ‘black’… The first job of a journalist is to report a story as accurately as possible. Part of the job of reporting Obama’s speech last night was to highlight his obvious pandering...”

A panelist on Fox Business doesn’t go quite that far, but says, the AP probably would have been panned regardless of their choice.

“Damned in you do, damned if you don't. If they had cleaned up the speech then they might have been accused of being racist to the other side and condescending. It's too much. It's not racist.”

Finally, Liberal blog Outside the Beltway agrees that quoting Obama’s speech pattern wasn’t racist in this case, but this judgment wouldn’t apply to all speakers.

“Obama was purposefully affecting an informal idiom in his speech and presenting that informality in the transcript captures that. It helps that the reader is likely to already have a firm sense of Obama’s intellect and verbal skills. If the speaker were a not particularly well known black man, a different judgment might have been called for.”
 

Transcript by Newsy.