Oprah Winfrey defended Sony chair Amy Pascal on Monday after Pascal’s racist comments about President Barack Obama were leaked to the media. “There are things that you say in your private conversations with your friends and with your colleagues that you would not want to be broadcast on CNN,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon. Yet in April, Oprah blasted former L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his tape-recorded racist comments.

“We’re off the plantation! The plantation days are over!” Winfrey told TMZ, adding that she hoped the Clippers would be bought by Magic Johnson. Sterling was banned for life from the NBA and forced to sell the team.

There is no difference between the Pascal and Sterling cases. Both were victims of allegedly illegal eavesdropping. (Both, moreover, are Democrats.) And yet Sterling was judged by a different standard.

(Update: Sterling is a registered Republican, even though he has contributed only to Democrats and has also supported liberal groups such as the NAACP–perhaps party affiliation explains the difference in treatment?)

Indeed, Lemon and fellow commentators at CNN seemed convinced by Oprah’s arguments, which echoed comments by others in Hollywood supporting Pascal and others ensnared in the Sony email hack.

Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak