On their website today, the Denver post ran an ordinary story about the Democratic National Convention, but inexplicably paired it with a picture of rap star Flava Flav.

Denver Post thinks Flava Flav represents Dems

Um… What the hell is this? Flav wasn’t mentioned in the story, and he’s hardly a typical big-money political donor.

Unless this is some sort of mistake, I find this facially offensive. Stories about Flav run in the Spotlight section next to quips about Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears; at best this pairing is the same basic depiction in that detestable McCain ad–that Obama isn’t to be taken seriously, that he’s more a media darling than world leader–and apropos of nothing.

If this isn’t a mistake, this visual rhetoric has insidious racial overtones. How would the McCain camp feel if a newspaper randomly paired an article about his coronation with an unexplained picture of a white comedian known for rubbing minorities the wrong way? How about if, as with Flav, the comedian had once been arrested for possession of 2 POUNDS of marijuana? (Even this hypothetical doesn’t capture the offensiveness of randomly associating 2 unaffiliated people from an historically marginalized group, as if to imply that they really are all the same after all.)

Go to FlavaFlav.net, and then try to tell me what the Post implies by this picture. Even better, look around online at the kind of company the Post is in for associating these two gentlemen.

Have we reached the point in the campaign that a major regional newspaper (the Post is the standard bearer among all papers between LA and Chicago) can just slap a random picture of any famous black man next to any story about Obama? Even if the other man is most famous for an idiosyncratic fashion statement, and his fame of late has come as a reality TV star?

I dearly hope this was a mistake–and if so, it was a mighty sloppy one.