Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) triggered a national backlash after he referred to intellectually disabled children as “retarded” on a podcast this weekend.
“When I first was an assemblyman, they wanted to build a congregate living place for retarded children,” Schumer said Sunday on the “1 NYCHA” podcast. He went on to say he assured the neighborhood that the children were “harmless.”
The term “mentally retarded,” introduced as a medical term in 1961, has since degenerated into an insult aimed at a person’s intelligence.
“The R-word is a form of hate speech,’” explained the Special Olympics. “Those who use the R-word often do so with little regard for the pain it causes people with intellectual disabilities — and the exclusion it perpetuates in our society.”
President Barack Obama struck the phrase from federal law in 2010. Most states, including New York, followed.
Schumer’s spokesman, Angelo Roefaro, apologized on his behalf, calling the senator “an ardent champion for enlightened policy.”
The media largely covered Schumer’s apology, rather than his use of the offensive phrase. Politico originally ran the headline, “Schumer uses outdated term for disabled children during housing interview” — which it promptly updated to “Schumer apologizes after using outdated term ….” HuffPost led with the apology. The Hill offered a more opaque headline yet, reporting, “Schumer apologizes for term describing developmentally disabled children.”
Many readers nationally would be perplexed about why Schumer is apologizing. Schumer’s hometown newspaper, the New York Times, has not carried a single story on either his remarks or his apology. Neither have The Washington Post, The Associated Press, Reuters, MSNBC, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, Axios.
Their coverage could hardly contrast more with the way they covered then-President Donald Trump in 2018, when unverified claims surfaced that he allegedly used the same phrase.
When Bob Woodward’s book Fear claimed without proof that Trump uttered the phrase in frustration against Attorney General Jeff Sessions:
- CNN called the same formulation “shocking and profane.” The network claimed in a separate story that the two phrases Trump allegedly used against Sessions are “the most impactful epithet[s] you can throw at someone” from the South, “[t]his side of the n-word”;
- The Associated Press called Trump’s use of the putative quotation “one of the more incendiary claims” in the book;
- Reuters treated the quotation as an example of how President “Trump treated top aides with scorn”;
- Axios included the phrase in a list of alleged Trump insults;
- ABC News, which led with the quotation, said that Woodward’s book “depicts the president as angry, frustrated and paranoid”;
- Jennifer Rubin wrote in The Washington Post that the phrase demonstrated “the president’s seething contempt for his base”;
- CBS News reported that Woodward’s book “describes numerous cases of the president disparaging Cabinet members and senior staffers.” CBS later posted the president’s denial — after quoting the “mentally retarded” comment in four separate stories; and
- The New York Times mentioned the quotation in at least eight stories, including one pushing back against Trump’s denial.
Rather than let the story go to waste, HuffPost noted that Trump’s denial claimed he had never used the phrase before and then posted a video of Trump using the phrase years earlier during an appearance on “The Howard Stern Show.” Conflating the two events, The Washington Post stated that “video and transcripts have surfaced proving the president wrong” in the entirety of his denial. The Hill also cited the footage.
NBC News dismissed Trump’s denials:
Trump’s disdain for Sessions, so often articulated in his own Twitter feed, is as legendary as Woodward’s ability to get everyone to talk. And Trump has called people “mentally retarded” before. With that context, it isn’t hard to believe he called Sessions a “dumb Southerner,” too.
The Washington Post and The New York Times took the same line.
The legacy media’s concern marked a new approach to the public use of the term “retarded,” a term offensive to the 6.5 million Americans who suffer from intellectual disabilities/cognitive delays.
In 2016, self-help guru Deepak Chopra called Trump “emotionally retarded,” adding, “Maybe he’s mentally retarded, too.” The news outlets again had no coverage of his offensive phrase.
A previous version of this article erroneously included Huffpost in the list of outlets that haven’t covered Schumer’s remarks or apology. This claim has been removed.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.