Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  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 no
t 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.

  Moreover, regardless of how professional tough-lover Juan Williams, a Caribbean American like Orlando Patterson, rates Hispanic behavior above that of blacks, there is a larger drug problem among Hispanics both in terms of addiction and distribution, and Blow and Gates, Jr. might want to know that there are more cases of unmarried motherhood among Hispanics, per thousand, than among blacks, yet President Obama, who uses personal responsibility as code words, told the council of La Raza that he shared the values of the Hispanics. This was a week after the president appeared before a black audience and read the required tough-love speech to black fathers for which he was congratulated by white divorced fathers like Joe Scarborough.

  If he’d done the same before a Hispanic audience he would have lost the Hispanic vote. Hispanics are the country’s largest minority, yet the social pathologies of this group and of other ethnic groups are ignored by the media and the black tough-love entrepreneurs like Gates, Jr., Williams, Patterson, Michelle Bernard, CNN’s Tara Wall, who works for Rev. Moon’s far right The Washington Times, and President Obama, yet these people are promoted as those who place race in the background. As an example of The Washington Times’ attitude toward Obama, on November 17, 2009, an opinion written by Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus, drew shock for its coarseness and hostility. Not only do Pruden and others desire to control the reproductive rights of American women, but whom they should date. “It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of ‘the 57 states’ is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.” (Don’t expect Tara Wall, Brian DeBose, Walter Williams, Tom Sowell and other Washington Times black columnists and reporters to object to such distasteful comments.)

  In the language of recovery, don’t the objects of tough love get some positive behavior points or some positive reinforcement when they do something right? And if these commentators are truly beyond race why not extend their tough love to other ethnic communities. I once told Gates that some of the white men who sponsor him for his tough-love views have a worse record of treating women of their ethnic group than the brothers. He wasn’t aware. Marty Peretz, then editor of The New Republic, where a surrogate was hired to call me a misogynist, said that black women were “culturally deficient.” When FAIR asked Tabloid Tina Brown to condemn him the way that one of her surrogates did a hit job on Minister Louis Farrakhan, she refused. You won’t find a discussion of tensions between Jewish women and Jewish men in The New Republic, which are so strained that Katha Politt of The Nation accused Jewish men of having “anti-Semitic attitudes” toward Jewish women. Maybe Charles Blow should come up with a graph about this situation. David Simon, a television series. Steven Spielberg, a movie.

  Though Gates, Jr., who views himself as the leader of the Black Intelligentsia (essentially people clustered around a few colleges and universities located in the Northeast), is pessimistic about Obama’s election leading to a reduction of drug addiction among blacks, out here in California white suburban women do more dope than blacks and Latinos. Why no tough love for these women? The Gates piece, published at TheRoot, was congratulated by white subscribers for whom he had given their required superiority injection by commenting on the moral degeneracy of blacks, which, according to him, wouldn’t improve even if you had a Clintonite black president in the White House. These underclass blacks are obviously incorrigible and will never drink white wine at the Harvard Club.

  Professional critics of African Americans also viewed it ironic that blacks would vote for a black president yet vote for Proposition 8, the California initiative that opposed gay marriage. Latinos (sixty-one percent) and Asian Americans also voted for the proposition and the money that got the measure over came from the coffers of the Mormon Church. As a sign of how members of other ethnic groups are cashing in on the market of boosting white esteem by dissing blacks, the writer hired by the San Francisco Chronicle to comment on the black vote for Proposition 8 was a Latino. Predictably, The New York Times, that casts blacks as the key players in social pathologies including crime, anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc., ran an article blaming the success of Proposition 8, the referendum on gay marriage, on blacks, though most of the hate crimes against gays are perpetrated by white men—the group the media has seen as its target audience since the 1800s—two white journalists were hired to explain black attitudes toward gays to the Times readers. One was Benjamin Schwarz, who once wrote that black men in the South who were lynched probably deserved it, and Caitlin Flanagan. (Schwarz now writes for The Atlantic Monthly, which was among the first magazines to excerpt Scots Irish writer Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which carries stereotypes aimed at his ethnic group over to blacks. The joke is that because of incest, Charles Murray’s Scots Irish are feeble minded. This is why Vice President Cheney got into trouble for his remark, “I have Cheneys on each side of the family and I’m not even from West Virginia.” He was talking about the incest stereotype applied t
o Charles Murray’s people.) I guess we can’t get Ms. Flanagan to write about how Irish Catholics voted. On the Sunday that their Times piece appeared, December 7, 2008, the BBC reported that the Vatican had opposed a measure that France and The Netherlands sponsored, a declaration that would de-criminalize homosexual relationships. Maybe Ms. Flanagan was too busy blaming homophobia on blacks and explaining black homophobia to the readers of the Times to notice this BBC report. The response of segments of the Catholic Church to Obama’s election was bizarre. One headline read: “Vatican Cardinal calls Obama Apocalyptic.” In the article, His Eminence James Francis Cardinal Stafford criticized President-elect Barack Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.”

  “For the next few years,” Stafford went on to say, “Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” comparing America’s future with Obama as president to “Jesus’ agony in the garden.” “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake,” said Cardinal Stafford, adding that Catholics must deal with the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” by beginning a new sentiment where one is “with Jesus, sick because of love.”

  At The Daily Dish, Bell Curve supporter Andrew Sullivan opined, “the notion that the recent election of Obama is a sign of the Apocalypse has, until now, been restricted to Protestant loonies.” Though many members of the chattering class, as segregated an institution as Old Miss before integration, have commented that Barack Obama has gotten a free pass, or as David Gregory, Imus Alumni and new Meet The Press host, said on December 14, “a lot of latitude…,” Obama was confronted with the dirtiest and most racist campaign in American history. Not only did MSNBC bring in its right-wing black clean-up crew including Tara Wall, DeBose, Larry Elder, Amy Holmes, Bush preacher, Rev. Eugene Rivers, and Jonathan Capehart, a black journalist whom The Washington Post considers safe, to criticize the candidate; Richard Prince, media watcher from the Maynard Institute, said that one powerful news agency, The Associated Press, supported McCain. No candidate in the past has been called “The Anti Christ,” or “The Beast of the Apocalypse, 666.” Yet, Howard Kurtz said that the press was one hundred percent behind Obama. One hundred percent? Appearing before a group of radio and television producers, Roger Ailes, president of Fox News, and one of the masterminds behind the notorious Willie Horton ad, made a joke: “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said: ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’”