What the hell is going on with this insanely racist Fox News segment about Chinatown?

By Rafi Schwartz | October 5, 2016 | 5:49pm

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Fox News is hardly considered a bastion of racial sensitivity. Still, even by those diminished standards, a recent “man on the street” segment, filmed in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, is a new low.

Watch (if you can) as O’Reilly Factor reporter Jesse Watters harangues person after person with a series of increasingly racist insinuations about China, Chinese culture, and the 2016 election

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“Do you have any traditional Chinese herbs for…’performance’,” he asks one clearly uncomfortable interviewee, before smarming “…I meant on television!”

Yeah, it’s that bad.

“They’re such a polite people, they won’t walk away, or tell me to get out of here. They just sit there and say nothing,” Watters marveled in a post-segment outro with host Bill O’Reilly.

Maybe such obviously offensive buffoonery just left them speechless?

Update: On Wednesday afternoon, the Asian American Journalists Association responded to the segment, calling it “rude, offensive, mocking, derogatory and damaging.” In a statement put out by the organization, AAJA MediaWatch asked for both an apology from Fox News, and for the opportunity to meet with O’Reilly Factor producers “to understand how this segment was conceived and greenlit to air.”

By late Wednesday afternoon, Watters himself issued a lukewarm apology of sorts for the segment, calling it “tongue-in-cheek” and expressing “regret” at having offended anyone.