Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (7 page)

Air America's Rachel Maddow seems to be the only MSNBC commentator who views the double standard being applied to Obama and other presidential candidates, when she's not interrupted bullied and screamed at by Joe Scarborough who has to carry on like a maniac in order not to meet the same fate as Tucker Carlson. His show was cancelled. If two CNN reporters on the show
Ballot Bowl
surmised that Obama's association with Rev. Wright hurt him, why doesn't Hillary Clinton's association with Billy Graham, her spiritual advisor, hurt her? In a
Time
interview, Hillary Clinton reported that the evangelist “fulfilled a pastoral role during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and helped the First Lady endure the ordeal. At that time, Clinton said, Graham was ‘incredibly supportive to me personally. And he was very strong in saying, ‘I really understand what you're doing and I support you.' He was just very personally there for me.'”

Billy Graham in a conversation with Richard Nixon described the Jews as “satanic” and offered that they owned the media and peddled pornography. If Mrs. Clinton denounced and rejected Billy Graham, of whom the editor of
Newsweek
Jon Meacham likened to God with his blue eyes, etc., her poll numbers would decline overnight. Jon Meacham was on a Sunday talk show, March 23, 2008, criticizing Rev. Wright and taking some jabs at Obama, part of it laced with sarcasm. He said that now people have found that Obama doesn't “walk on water,” maybe because for Meacham only Billy Graham can perform such miracles.

And if that weren't enough, the day before, C-Span's guest was Donald Lambro,
The Washington Times
' chief political correspondent who joined in the media's running loop devoted to criticizing Obama's relationship with his pastor. The Friday before, Diana West, a reporter for the same paper, appearing on the Lou Dobbs show, criticized Michelle Obama and Rev. Wright for their “anti-Americanism,” and quoted Victor Davis Hanson, a far-right columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Their boss is Rev. Sun Myung Moon who warns Korean widows that their husbands will go to hell if they don't give him money. If, for them, Obama should disown Rev. Wright, why are they still working for a religious shakedown artist? Why don't they step away from Rev. Moon's anti-Americanism reported by Robert Parry of
Consortiumnews
:

…Moon's jingle of deep-pocket cash also has caused conservatives to turn a deaf ear toward Moon's recent anti-American diatribes. With growing virulence, Moon has denounced the United States and its democratic principles, often referring to America as “Satanic.” But these statements have gone virtually unreported, even though the texts of his sermons are carried on the Internet and their timing has coincided with Bush's warm endorsements of Moon.

“America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists,” Moon preached in Tarrytown, N. Y., on March 5, 1995. “You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan.”

In similar remarks to followers on August 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church's eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism. “Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people,” Moon declared. “The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested.”

During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women: “American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position,” he said. “However, woman's shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. (…) Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place.

“Does woman contain the seed of life? [“No.”] Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent.”

(On November 18,
The Washington Post
reported that Richard Miniter, former editorial page editor of
The Washington Times,
had filed a complaint against the paper, charging that he was “coerced” into attending a Unification Church religious ceremony that culminated in a mass wedding conducted by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.)

Diana West and Donald Lambro are applying a double standard for their boss and for Rev. Wright. And why does CNN keep on as a regular the employee of a man who hates our country so much? Does Lou Dobbs agree that the United States is satanic? Does Jonathan Klein, CNN's boss? Where is NOW?

When Richard Cohen appeared on television on March 21, he joined the media chorus in taking offense to the remarks of Rev. Wright. This is the columnist who defended the practice of racial profiling by Washington shopkeepers.

On March 20, the Dalai Lama was the subject of gushing praise by a writer for
Time
magazine where Rev. Wright had been roistered all week on cable. From
Jameswagner.com
: “the Dalai Lama explicitly condemns homosexuality, as well as all oral and anal sex. His stand is close to that of Pope John Paul II, something his Western followers find embarrassing and prefer to ignore. His American publisher even asked him to remove the injunctions against homosexuality from his book,
Ethics for the New Millennium
, for fear they would offend American readers, and the Dalai Lama acquiesced.”

Also, why isn't there a running loop about John McCain's relationship with controversial ministers? Are those who control the media easy on him because he plays the father in their fantasies?

What about these “wackadoodles”? The late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Rev. John Hagee. About 9/11, Falwell said “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For The American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.'”

And Pat Robertson: “I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you, this is not a message of hate—this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It'll bring about terrorist bombs; it'll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.” This was Robertson commenting on “gay days” at Disneyworld.

John McCain's spiritual advisor is Rev. John Hagee. He says that the Roman Catholic Church and Hitler formed an alliance for the purpose of exterminating the Jews. Hurricane Katrina, for him, was God's punishment for a gay rights parade that occurred in New Orleans.

The double standard applied to Obama, the Clintons and Senator McCain and their relationship to controversial pastors is the result of a media gone wild. (On
The View
, Elisabeth Hasselbeck even compared Rev. Wright to Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal). A media that, since the O.J. trial, has found that it can make more money from the racial divide than by any of the other fault lines in American life.

While Obama talked to Americans as though they were adults, the media treated the controversy as though it were a video game in which Rev. Wright was the heavy. They OJayed Wright for cash. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream. Here's mine. What would happen if all of the whites holding forth in Op-Eds and on cable about race—both in the progressive and corporate media—the middle persons who interpret black America for whites (when they are capable of speaking for themselves), the screenwriters and TV writers who make millions from presenting blacks as scum, and the authors of the fake ghetto books, would just shut the fuck up for a few months and listen. Just listen. Listen to blacks, browns, reds and yellows, people whose views are ignored by the segregated media. Listen, not just to their meek colored mind doubles like an Obama critic, Rev. Rivers, who nobody's ever heard of, but people who will level with them.

In 1957, Doubleday released Richard Wright's
White Man Listen
. In it, he wrote “…the greatest aid that any white Westerner can give Africa is by becoming a missionary right in the heart of the Western world, explaining to his own people what they have done to Africa.”

Nobody expects the media to educate the public about Africa. The current coverage is consistent with the images found in the Tarzan movies. It's not going to change. I'll settle for missionary work among the American public. Free them from entrapment by the corporate media, which are causing their brain cells to atrophy. Teach them the other points of views that are smothered by the noise, and trivialized on You Tube. Then maybe they'll understand where the crazy Rev. Wright is coming from.

(For Quincy Troupe's magazine
Black Rennaissance Noire
, I contrasted the treatment of Pope Benedict and Sarah Palin with that accorded Barack Obama. While Rev. Wright was hammered around the clock, Sarah Palin and Benedict were given a free pass. The media were more outraged by a black man's preaching style, which a
Newsweek
writer, with little acquaintance with black culture called “hysterical,” than with a Christian leader, Pope Benedict, who continues to cover up the church's pedophilia scandal, one of the worst to hit the Catholic Church since the days of Saint Peter, and one ignored by
The New York Times
recent conservative hire. In January of 2009, the Pope “unexcommunicated” a bishop who has denied the Holocaust.)

T
he responses to the election of the first Celtic-African-American president tested powerful institutions, whose monopoly over how opinion is formed was challenged in a manner rarely seen. In fact these institutions were subjected to what amounted to a grass roots revolt. While the Clinton machine sought to win some Southern states by buying off black preachers, a technique described in
It Can't Happen Here
, their congregations flocked to Barack Obama's candidacy in droves. Clinton supporters among the black leadership had to abandon the candidacy of Mrs. Clinton as they were swept along by the currents arising from below.

Other elements of the religious community compared his election as nothing less than the appearance of the anti-Christ, predicted in the Book of Revelations. A bishop connected to the Vatican said that his election was “apocalyptic,” yet the majority of Catholics voted for Obama. The ultra right responded by issuing death threats. Though the Secret Service reported that a rise in death threats against the candidate correlated with the speeches of Sarah Palin, she was still defended by upper and middle class white media feminists like Mika Emilie Leonia Brzezinski, Andrea Mitchell and Tabloid Tina Brown. The have-it-both-ways bent of privileged upper class feminism was revealed in Mrs. Mitchell's comment that vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden would do well in a debate against Sarah Palin because he had a reputation for being “courtly.” “Courtly” against a woman who described herself as a “pit-bull.” Pit-bulls have been known to maim and kill. Aren't we lucky that Joe McCarthy didn't have a hot body!

His election also demonstrated how out of touch this feminist leadership is not only with minority women and white rank and file women, whose votes supported Obama after predictions that he would lose those votes, but also with the global sisterhood. When Senator Clinton said that she would obliterate Iran, I figured that a lot of her Iranian sisters might be hurt. This military hawk was chosen as Obama's Secretary of State and Madeline Albright a foreign policy advisor. This is the woman who said the deaths of five hundred thousand children as a result of President Clinton's embargo on Iraq was worth it. For his economic council he chose Lawrence Summers who believes that Africa is unpolluted and a good place to store waste. At Harvard Summers made a comment doubting the math and science aptitude of women. President Obama's choice for attorney general spent many hours arranging for the pardon of Marc Rich, but apparently didn't encourage the president to pardon the thousands of blacks who were sent to prison as a result of his 1995 Omnibus Crime Bill, a bill the former president said he regretted.

The Talented Tenth, a term used by W.E.B. DuBois to describe the vanguard of educated blacks who would lead blacks to liberation, performed their usual role of using the election of their fellow Talented Tenther to scold the black “underclass” for their behavior. The rich white men who own the media used these writers to act as a buffer between their white subscribers and blacks whose views might make them uncomfortable. Since these writers have little financial control over media that air their views, they behave as independent contractors for newspapers, cable and think tanks whose sales pitch originates with the penny press of the 1830s, which, like today's media, viewed its market as that of white males. Rev. Barbara Reynolds was fired from
USA Today
for not comforting this demographic; apparently Zambia-born Amy Holmes whom
USA Today
hired did. Ms. Holmes described as a “Republican Strategist” is an all purpose black right-winger who is shuttled from cable show to show when someone is needed to take down black people and President Obama. She and other African-born intellectuals promote the stereotype that the immigrant African intellectuals and writers are acceptable to corporate media and academia because they are less confrontational than traditional black Americans, as one white Louisiana professor told me after a few drinks. We hear very little about African immigrant intellectuals, writers and public intellectuals who have formed an alliance with their African-American counterparts.

Today's media, like the old penny presses, market the moral superiority of whites. Black moral failures are played up while those of whites—widespread drug addiction, unmarried motherhood and crime—are underreported, or when reported, spinned.

When the Republican Party nominated Mrs. Sarah Palin, the head of a dysfunctional family, as vice-presidential candidate, all of a sudden unmarried pregnancy became a hip thing and some of the white pundits gave a glimpse into the dysfunction in the white community, inadvertently.

Obtaining information about what goes on behind the curtains of Mall Land is like it was getting information about unrest behind the Iron Curtain in the old days. Reporting as some of those pundits did on
Morning Joe
that “every family had a case like Bristol Palin” indicates that unmarried motherhood among whites is more widespread than the media reports. After the election it was revealed that the Palin family had splurged on GOP funds for their own fashion interests without Mrs. Palin being called a “welfare queen,” and on December 20, 2008, Sherry L. Johnston, the future mother-in-law of Bristol, Mrs. Palin's unmarried daughter, was busted in Wasilla, Alaska, for charges “…in relation to the drug Oxycontin.”

Judging from products created by white writers, who have a monopoly over how blacks are depicted in literature, television and the movies, you'd think, if you watched merchandise like
The Wire
, that drugs were a black problem, exclusively. The only difference between a writer like David Simon, whose television series
The Wire
appeals to the feelings of white moral superiority, and a publisher like James Gordon Bennett, whose 1830s newspaper circulated stories of blacks committing cannibalism (a story that makes it into
The
New York Times
Magazine
section from time to time), is that Simon's profitable enterprise of selling white moral superiority reaches a world-wide audience—an audience that makes judgments about black Americans based on products like his. (As a result of the profits earned by
The Wire
, Allen Hughes, a black filmmaker, has been hired by HBO to do a series about an aging black pimp who is under attack by violent younger pimps. It's to be filmed on location in Oakland where members of other ethnic groups are actually making more money at it; some have been at it since the Gold Rush. Think that HBO would do a story about the customers of black and Asian Oakland prostitutes? Seventy percent are from the suburbs.)

Of the hypocrisy of the white right, neo-cons and even
The Nation
white male writer, who congratulated Obama on his “critique of the black family,” Byron York of
The National Review
, a conservative, said that “If the Obamas had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.”

Shortly before the purge of African-American journalists at National Public Radio, neo-Liberal NPR's Michele Norris said on the
Chris Matthews Show
that with the election of Obama, young black men would cease wearing dreadlocks and saggy pants. This comment occurred at the same time that a white gang beat a Hispanic man to death, yet if Ms. Norris did a NPR comment about how the typical hate crime is perpetrated by young white men they wouldn't air it.

What do you think would have happened had partying black or Hispanic youths and not white youths begun a bonfire that caused the destruction of 210 homes of wealthy Southern Californians? I was in Los Angeles when it was discovered that this was the origin of one of the 2008 fires, but the local news that reported the story didn't even identify them. The Associated Press reported:

A bonfire built by a group of young adults caused a weekend wildfire in Santa Barbara that destroyed 210 homes, including multimillion-dollar mansions, and injured more than two dozen people, authorities said Tuesday. An anonymous tip led to the discovery that ten college students had gathered for a late night hangout at an abandoned property where the fire originated, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said. He declined to say which college the students attended.

As for the white boy who murdered a Hispanic,
The New York Times
just about wrote his defense, a
Times
policy about which complaints were received. In 2000, the New York City Youth Media Study found that white youth guilty of crimes are shown in their yearbook pictures while youthful black and Hispanics are identified by mug shots. This is not only the policy of the
Times
but of cable networks like CNN, which conceals the identity of white youthful perps while exposing those of black or Hispanic youth.

Michelle Bernard, one of the few regular black talking heads on MSNBC and head of an organization that is funded by the far right, the Independent Women's Forum, congratulated President Obama's singling out blacks for tough-love lectures about “personal responsibility.” She said that “personal responsibility” was especially a problem in the black community, the kind of group libel that blacks are subjected to each day by the media. Wish she'd tell that to the parents of those Dallas white middle class teenagers who are overdosing on cheese heroin, a story that barely merited a crawl on CNN, which runs mug shots of blacks all day and designates its crew of female surrogates to lecture black men about their behavior. Bernard is another person whose point of view is restricted by her white employers. Were she to present commentaries with some heft, she'd meet the fate of George Curry, Jack White, Ed Gordon, and the scores of journalists who, according to media watcher Richard Prince, are being shown the door. Fired and bought out.

In their bogus
Black In America
special, an excuse by CNN head Jonathan Klein to draw ratings—he was successful—, Soledad O'Brien scolded a black man for not attending his daughter's birthday party. Here again the old 1830s media strategy of boosting white morality by denigrating that of blacks is used by Jonathan Klein in the same manner that Buffalo Bill sought ticket sales by staging Indian attacks on cabins sheltering virtuous helpless white women.

On July 17, 2009,
The New York Times
pundit Sam Roberts, who once said that blacks are prone to violence, and when I reminded him, didn't remember, quoted Census figures which showed a rise in two-parent households among blacks and a decline in two-parent households among whites, giving support to Andrew Hacker's remark that were Daniel Moynihan around today he'd be writing about “the tangle of pathologies” in the white community. The
Times
also reported that while the rate of incarceration among black women has declined that of white women is on the rise. Obviously, the behaviors of Paris, Lindsay, Britney, the Barbie bandits, and the girls who beat up a schoolmate and broadcast it on You Tube are part of a trend.

Bush supporter Tara Wall, CNN's regular black talking head and Rev. Moon's employee (nothing like seeing Rev. Moon's people on MSNBC and CNN hold forth on Rev. Jeremiah Wright), mentioned that seventy-three percent of black children have been born out of wedlock, a figure that the right has bandied about for decades despite figures from the Centers of Disease Prevention and Control that there's been a significant decline in such births over the last decade. Charles Blow of
The New York Times
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on his blog,
TheRoot
, bankrolled by
The Washington Post
, used Obama's election to excoriate blacks again for unmarried motherhood and drug addiction. Both Charles Blow and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. are also apparently unaware that black teenage pregnancy has declined significantly over the last ten years with only a slight up-tick last year. I reminded Blow that these statistics were printed in his newspaper!!
The New York Times
. He didn't reply, which is how the black tough-lovers treat their critics even though some of the academics among them pretend to love the Socratic dialogue. Ninety percent of the white pundits whom I have questioned, including Frank Rich, Richard Lowry, Sam Roberts, Samuel Freedman, Andrew Sullivan—pundits of the right and left—have replied to my questions about their coverage of black issues, but Bob Herbert, Charles Blow and black pundits who soak all of the little opinion oxygen that the conservative media owners allot to blacks feel that they are above debate. The wealthy white men who promulgate their views shield them and the neo-liberals and neo-cons and plain pawns of the right like John McWhorter, Steele, and Connerley. Orlando Patterson, apparently the only African American on the rolodex of the
Times
Op-Ed page editor, hailed Obama's election as a sign that the United States is the greatest democracy since the Greeks, which would probably come as a surprise to the thousands of Greek slaves. On the day after the election
The New York Times
announced in its headline that Obama's election had broken a barrier, yet on the editorial page all of the poets who were invited to chime in were white. Some barriers remain.