NEW YORK — Fox News Channel commentator Glenn Beck said he thinks President Barack Obama is a racist.
Beck made the statement during a guest appearance Tuesday on the “Fox & Friends” morning show. He said Obama has exposed himself as a person with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
His remarks came in a discussion of Obama’s reaction to the arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Obama spokesman William Burton said the White House had no comment on Beck.
Beck’s statement was challenged on the air by Fox host Brian Kilmeade, who noted that most of the people who work for the nation’s first black president are white.
“I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” Beck said. “He has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
Beck wondered, during the discussion, what other president would immediately jump on the police for their actions in the case. Obama said he thought the police acted stupidly in the case, but later backtracked from the statement and invited Gates and the police officer to the White House for a meeting later this week.
Bill Shine, Fox News senior vice president of programming, told the TVNewser website that Beck had “expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel.”
