The report is heavily biased towards the view that the commercial was bad and needed to be pulled, but it does admit these two truths:
* None of the Japanese people shown the commercial by CNN saw any link to Obama.
* eMobile has received no complaints from Japanese customers.
Sometimes a monkey is just a monkey. To the Japanese people that made the commercial and the Japanese viewers watching it, the commercial was just about eMobile’s cute Japanese monkey mascot running a campaign of change. The monkey is not “portraying” Barack Obama, he’s just using Obama’s campaigning style to draw people to eMobile’s products. The commercial has nothing do to with race.