Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  Ishmael Reed

  Barack Obama

  and

  the Jim Crow Media

  The Return of the Nigger Breakers

  Essays

  Montreal

  This book is dedicated to the Maynard Dynasty, Dori, David and Alex, and to Timothy and Tennessee Reed whose second books-in-progress are Nightmares During The Day and Home of the X Challenged and in memory of Joyce Engelson and Nancy Maynard.

  “Notable East Bay residents hail Obama era’s dawn

  A

  s America awoke to a new chapter of history Wednesday, some notable East Bay residents offered their views on what the Obama victory and presidency might mean.

  Poet, essayist and novelist Ishmael Reed, 70, of Oakland, said he was in a Mexican restaurant with a largely black clientele Tuesday night when television networks began announcing Obama’s win.

  ‘There was spontaneous cheering, a real outpouring of joy and emotion,’ he said. ‘Drove to downtown Oakland and people were honking horns and cheering, and I told my spouse and daughter that this must’ve been what it was like in the South when the Emancipation Proclamation had been declared.’

  But Reed said the initial enthusiasm may wane for some.

  ‘A lot of people are going to be disillusioned because Obama is a centrist, even conservative in some areas,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect drastic and radical changes under his administration. But I think it has great symbolic value that might trickle down to the black and Hispanic younger generation. I hope it gets through to the kids who shoot it out on my streets.’

  Reed said Obama seems emblematic of the new black aesthetic described in Trey Ellis’ landmark essay almost two decades ago.

  ‘Obama’s the leader of a post-race generation,’ he said. ‘I look at this sort of like a Nelson Mandela-type administration of reconciliation, but the economic power will still be in the hands of whites. Obama got more money from Wall Street than McCain, and those people are not socialists no matter what Mrs. Palin says.

  ‘Some of these people who were cheering last night, who were dancing in the streets all over the world, are in for a big surprise.’”

  The Oakland Tribune, November 8, 2008

  “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

  Senator Jim DeMint

  Foreword

  The Media’s lack of diversity skews news judgment. To the more than 7,000 minority journalists who massed in Washington last week for a meeting rooted in their long fight to make the staffs of the nation’s newsgathering organizations more diverse, the newsrooms of this city’s national press corps must have looked like enemy bunkers.

  By DeWayne Wickham Posted 8/9/2004 9:43 PM

  W

  hen my novel Flight To Canada was published in 1976, I could not have imagined that I would live to see the time when the points of view of African Americans in the media and elsewhere would be so marginalized that I would be in the position of the nineteenth-century fugitive slave orator. That I would have to take an intellectual Black Rock ferry across the river into Canada in order to make my case because, in the words of my agent, no American publisher would publish this book.

  I’m among the lucky ones. Great African-American journalists, like Pulitzer Prize winner Les Payne, have lost their columns in major American newspapers, which have seen their news rooms emptied of the presence of black, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native-American journalists except for those who adhere to the line promoted by the multinationals, who control the American media, and right-wing and neo-conservative think tanks. That line is that the problems confronting black and other Americans are not structural and institutional but a result of their behavior, or as put by Jamaican American Orlando Patterson, one of the few African Americans invited to appear on the pages of The New York Times Op-Ed page, most of whom aim their “tough love” at blacks, exclusively, their lack of “internal cultural reformation.” This oversimplification is refuted by studies and reports printed in the Times showing, for example, bias toward blacks and Hispanics in the mortgage industry, which has cost black homeowners billions in home equity and denied millions of blacks home ownership, homes being the chief asset of white Americans, one that allows them to send their children to college and to open businesses. For a while, the press tried to blame the economic crisis on blacks, a claim refuted by Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, appearing on C-Span’s The Washington Journal on June 26, 2009. Indeed, the state with the most mortgage foreclosures is Nevada, a state with a small black population.

  Isn’t it ironic? A media that scolded the Jim Crow South in the 1960s now finds itself hosting the bird. Jim Crow in the South meant separate but unequal facilities. It meant that any white woman who accused a black man of rape was believed.

  In the media it means that whites get the choice billion-dollar media equipment and the rest of us get the blogs. It means all-white media juries disguised as panels and debates evaluating the behavior of not only the blacks and Hispanics but also celebrities and the president of the United States. Not just cable television but web browsers like AOL and YAHOO peddle “news” almost daily about black celebrities, usually athletes, caught in scandals, an attempt to entertain their white subscribers. AOL’s expert on black culture and history is intellectual mercenary Dinesh D’Souza.

  In terms of its attempt to build a media that “looks like America,” the media are as white as a KKK picnic. In terms of diversity, it’s fifty years behind Mississippi, that much maligned state that has a higher percentage of blacks with power than CBS. Mississippi is among five states with the highest number of black elected officials; Old Miss has a higher percentage of black enrollment than many northern and western colleges and universities.

  Serious black intellectuals have vanished from publishing and a younger generation of black male authors has found greater success in Germany than in the United States. Hollywood, which has always poisoned American race relations, except for brief interludes, is producing movies like Precious, movies so foul in their representation of blacks they make D.W. Griffith seem like a progressive. As I write this, the motion picture academy, whose board of governors is entirely white, has nominated this foul project for six Oscars[1]. To add to this insult, The Wire, which portrays blacks as degenerates, produced by David Simon, a producer who has claimed the ghetto as his own private moneymaking reserve, is being taught in the African-American Studies department at Harvard. According to The New York Times, January 4, 2010, “For the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when Dr. Wilson gathered scholars, activists and the show’s creator to analyze the series’ impact, he did not mince words: ‘it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality than any other media event or scholarly publications, including studies by social scientists,’” which is like a Native-American scholar inviting a producer of one of John Wayne’s westerns and describing these westerns as having “done more to enhance our understanding,” of Native American life than any study offered by social scientists.

  Ms. Laura Miller’s comment in Salon.com sums up the attitude of the establishment media, progressive, right, left and mainstream, toward the views of what might be regarded as rogue intellectuals or what Quincy Troupe calls “Unreconstructed Negroes” like me on a number of issues including the candidacy of Barack Obama. Reviewing my essay about Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Ms. Laura gave me a tongue lashing in the progressive Salon.com, whose editor, Joan Walsh, a guest on many all-white media panels, where she poses as a progressive, believes that the all-white jury, which acquitted four white poli
cemen who murdered Amadou Diallo, was justified in reaching their decision.

  Ms. Laura said that my essay style was “rowdy” and that my writings were “diatribes.” This is because I opposed the notion that there were no heroes or villains during the slavery period, the line that is being used to peddle post-race products like the work of Kara Walker. Post-racism is another mass delusion under which many Americans are laboring. If Ms. Laura were acquainted with the history of African-American literature she would know that black writers, especially the males, have been called “rowdy,” “bitter,” “paranoid” and accused of writing only diatribes for over one hundred years. Even elegant James Baldwin was called “antagonistic.” When it comes to black literature, Ms. Laura Miller and her friend Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times prefer melodramas in which angelic do-no-wrong black heroines are surrounded by cruel and “evil”—Alice Walker’s word for the brothers—black men. Ms. Kakutani is so eager to accept stereotypes about black life that she celebrated a fake black ghetto “memoir,” Love And Consequences, written by Margaret Jones, a white woman. Now even the black women who serve up this kind of writing are being challenged by white women writers like Kathryn Stockett who not only copycat this style, like Elvis copycatted James Brown, but make more money doing it. This has caused outrage among some black women writers one of whom called this style “Neo-Mammy.” Yet, some of these same writers made no protest when The Color Purple and What’s Love Got To Do With It were manhandled by white producers, directors and script writers resulting in the black male perpetrators being represented in a worse manner than in the original texts.

  But even with the dismissal of my work by powerful critics like Ms. Laura Miller, unlike other black writers, I have not been silenced. I have my own zine, at IshmaelReedpub.com, and a blog at the San Francisco Chronicle. Lee Froehlich at Playboy has published a number of my essays and CounterPunch has been open to my views. In fact, many of the essays in this book were published originally at Counterpunch.org. They cover the candidacy of Barack Obama and the first year of his presidency.

  Obama compares himself to Abraham Lincoln and in at least one way that is true. During research for my novel, Flight To Canada, I examined some of the media coverage of Lincoln, especially from Confederate newspapers, and was taken aback by the vitriol that often referred to the president as an ape (one of the favorite descriptions of President Obama by his enemies).

  Before I was appointed chair of the PEN Oakland Media Committee, by chairperson and PEN President Floyd Salas, and before that, assigned to respond to a tough-love letter aimed at blacks printed in Esquire, I would have been surprised at such a description of a black man of Obama’s distinction, but since examining the media coverage of blacks and Hispanics and other minorities over the years, and having covered such portrayals in two books of essays, Airing Dirty Laundry, and Mixing It Up, Taking On The Media Bullies, I have discovered that these portrayals are par for the course, and are aimed not only at the underclass, but the middle class and the upper classes as well. There was no difference between the way the press assailed Reginald Lewis, the African-American head of a billion-dollar corporation, and the vehemence the same press accords a crack-dealing street thug.

  The media are a segregated white-owned enterprise with billions of dollars at their disposal. Their revenue stream is based upon holding unpopular groups to scorn and ridicule, a formula for ratings that dates to the early days of the mass media. Mexican Americans, Chinese and Japanese Americans, and Jewish Americans and even Italian Americans have taken turns being the targets of their abuse. Now it’s the Muslims. But among ethnic groups, it’s the African Americans who have been the permanent 24/7 group that is subjected to the media take down. The token black, Hispanic and Asian-American commentators are those found non-threatening to the media’s white subscribers and submissive to the editorial line coming from the top. They are like the black servants in Gone With The Wind who remained loyal to their masters even when the Union troops were approaching the city. George Bush received two percent of the black vote and it often seems that all two percent have jobs as commentators in the media. Two of the favorite black regulars on cable, Bob Christie and Joe Watkins, actually worked for Bush and Cheney. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS news, as a newsman who was tea-bagged and swift-boated out of his job, has warned about the undue influence of corporations upon news content. WMR reported:

  On September 16, Dan Rather, the former anchor of the CBS Evening News, warned that today’s news is shaped by very powerful corporate network owners who “are in bed with powerful political interests” that are influenced by government regulatory interests. [See breakdown below.]

  Rather spoke at a National Press Club remembrance of his colleague Walter Cronkite, his predecessor in the CBS Evening News anchor chair, and Don Hewitt, the late producer of 60 Minutes.

  Rather revealed that in his conversations with Cronkite, the late anchor also believed that corporate interests were shaping the news to the detriment of objective journalism.

  Not only are the media influenced by their corporate owners but are also under pressure from advertisers. Janine Jackson and Peter Hart of FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, pointed out that:

  A 2001 survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review, 11-12/01) found that 53 percent of local news directors “reported advertisers try to tell them what to air and not to air, and they say the problem is growing.” (…)

  In a 2000 Pew Center for the People & the Press poll of 287 reporters, editors and news executives, about one-third of respondents said that news that would “hurt the financial interests” of the media organization or an advertiser goes unreported. Forty-one percent said they themselves have avoided stories, or softened the tone on stories, to benefit their media company’s interests. Among investigative reporters, a majority (61 percent) thought that corporate owners exert at least a fair amount of influence on news decisions.

  Peter Phillips, assistant professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and director of Project Censored, a media research organization, has detailed “Corporate influence in the newsroom:”

  Eleven influential media corporations in the United States—General Electric Company (NBC), Viacom Inc. (cable), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner Inc. (CNN), Westinghouse Electric Corporation (CBS), The News Corporation Ltd. (Fox), Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., and the Times Mirror Co.—now represent a major portion of the news information systems in the United States. Many people have no other source of news and information than these 11 corporations.

  Collectively, these 11 corporations had 155 directors in 1996, and the directors accounted for 144 directorships on the boards of Fortune 1000 corporations in the United States. These directors are the media elite of the world. While they may not agree on abortion and other domestic issues, they do represent the collective vested interests of a significant portion of corporate America and share a common commitment to free market capitalism, economic growth, internationally protected copyrights, and a government dedicated to protecting their interests.

  These 11 media organizations have interlocking directorships with each other through 36 other Fortune 1000 corporations creating a solid network of overlapping interests and affiliations. All 11 media corporations have direct links with at least two of the other top media organizations. General Electric, owner of NBC, has the highest rate of shared affiliations with 17 direct corporate links to nine of 10 other media corporations.

  Given this interlocked media network, it is more than safe to say that major media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America, and that the media elite are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content, and the general use of media resources.

  Do the media elite directly censor the news? Without being privy to insider conversations, it is difficult to prove direct censorship by
management of particular stories in the news. But clearly an organizational tendency will be to comply with the general corporate culture, and career-minded journalists and editors sharing this common corporate culture will create what direct censorship cannot, a general compliance with the attitudes, wishes, and expectations of the media elite and in turn corporate America.

  Keeping democracy safe in America requires an informed electorate and a strong watchdog press. But major media today are tending to favor news stories on sex scandals, celebrity events, and crime, leaving less or little room for analytical news on important social issues. If privately owned commercial media will not meet the task of keeping democracy safe then it is time for a strong public supported national news system.

  Are we to believe that General Electric’s selling of health insurance doesn’t influence the position of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on the issue?

  Moreover, are the liberal and right-wing media the only outfits that omit the points of view of African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and others who are not former speechwriters for Dick Cheney, or token columnists at The National Review?

  As of this writing, the progressive network, Pacifica, is under fire by black media activists like Joseph Anderson and M.O.I. JR aka JR Valrey for its lack of inclusion and NPR, which is touted as a liberal network, is being criticized by the National Association of Black Journalists for firing black journalists and canceling black shows.

  When the National Association of Black Journalists protested the firings of blacks from National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, NPR’s chair and CEO said, in an attempt to stonewall the NABJ, that “the definition of diversity includes not only race and ethnicity, but also socioeconomic background, political perspective, gender and sexual identity, age, geography, point of view and a multitude of other factors that may not be obvious or measured.” Ms. Schiller must have adopted Gloria Steinem’s proposition that “gender” is the most “restrictive” element in American life. White gender that is! The white feminists and their surrogates didn’t care about the Central Park Five, whom they helped to send to prison for a crime that they didn’t commit, even though their mothers belonged to the same gender as they. Ms Schiller probably believes that her condition is worse than that of Emmett Till. Apparently Ms. Schiller isn’t aware that among the groups she mentioned, whites are at the top of the hierarchical ladder. When it comes to playing the race card, whites continue to hold all of the aces and so with the kind of absence of black journalists except those who mimic the views of the media owners (the only on-air African-American commentator at National Public Radio is right-winger Juan Williams, who is also a Fox contributor), President Obama continues to be reviewed by all-white panels, and whatever gains his programs might achieve, for them, he will always come up short or even fail. His children will be the targets of vicious comments. Juan Williams called his spouse, Michelle, “Stokely Carmichael in a dress.”