The award for baseless allegations with racist motivations goes to KSTP in Minneapolis, which is owned by right-wing Hubbard Broadcasting. You cannot make this stuff up.

Chris Hayes has the short report at the top, but Shaun King over at Daily Kos has much, much more.

Does the Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP not have a filter in which something that smells this bad gets flagged for poor journalism?

Sadly, only racism allows such an ugly story and stereotype to be advanced about a young man who was clearly not flashing a gang sign with the mayor of Minneapolis. He deserves a public apology and heads should roll at this station for even allowing it to ever make it to the air.

Furthermore, some real investigative journalism needs to uncover just why the police were willing to get behind such a phony story. Something smells off in a major way. Could it be because the mayor is behind the police wearing body cameras and the police faked this story hours before the pilot program was due to launch? Or could it be that she called out police corruption and vowed to clean it up last month?

Since KSTP ran this awful story, the hashtag #pointergate has gone viral with hundreds of photos of regular people and celebrities all over the world pointing at people in photos.

Here are a few samples, all taken BEFORE this outrageous scandal broke out.

Read the tweets for some humor, but the bottom line here is that there's nothing funny about it at all. The station should have to retract the entire story and apologize for it over and over and over again.