Slate.com, the left-y political and pop culture website that enjoys throwing convention to the wind for the sake of an interesting coverline, in January launched a black-interest website called TheRoot.com. (A personal finance site, The Big Money, is on the way from Slate's Washington Post Co. owners.) We had high expectations for The Root, given the names attached to the thing, like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Lynette Clemetson, and Malcolm Gladwell. But ever so slowly, we've watched the site turn from a sea of well-informed opinion into a cesspool of rhetorical questions that should never be asked. It's sad, too, because we publish the black-interest website Stereohyped, which looked at The Root's arrival not as a competitor, but a welcome addition to a frighteningly small pool of black-oriented web publications.

Today, The Root let Jeff Winbush publish the article "Can Black Journalists Be Trusted to Cover Obama?" We expected this to be a Slate-esque trick: Pose a question that the article will seek to disprove. (On Slate.com right now is the coverline "I'm Stockpiling Cheap Gasoline in My Garage. Am I an Idiot?" The article answers, "No.")

Instead, in trying to argue that the white journalists who are criticizing their black colleagues for not being impartial are fools, Winbush outs himself as a completely biased black journalist.

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Like a drug dealer who tells you his coke hasn't been spliced with rat poison, Slate's promotion of The Root's article on crack is misleading. [Radar]