Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  While the connections between corporate interests and the country’s leading conservative propagandist are extensive and obvious, there’s a stark contrast between the message delivered by Fox News and the interests of its parent company.

  Pierre-Damien, also a radio host, Justin Desmangles and Kofi Natambu are waging an uphill battle by using limited equipment against the corporate Behemoth that smothers dissenting opinion, but this is an improvement over the situation in the past when blacks, Latinos and others were subjected to an electronic mugging with no means with which to fight back. Others have chosen the stage to combat the media’s smearing of unpopular groups. In the fall of 2009, I was also able to witness the collaboration between other young people of different ethnic backgrounds, in their effort to challenge the way unpopular and misunderstood groups are portrayed by the media.

  From Jubilation at Election Night…

  To Cries of Kill Him

  (AOL September 30, 2009. “White supremacists and neo-Nazis have committed violence against African Americans around the country and fomented hate online for years. But in recent weeks, anti-Obama speech and behavior hinting at or advocating violence has surfaced at so-called town hall meetings and demonstrations against Obama’s health-care plan and other policies. The same has happened at forums frequented by fringe groups, including ‘birthers,’ who dispute Obama’s U.S. citizenship.

  In August, the Secret Service investigated a man who displayed a sign reading ‘Death to Obama’ and ‘Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids’ outside a town hall meeting in Maryland. And in New Hampshire, a man brought a holstered gun and stood across the street from a presidential town hall with his weapon on full display, according to ABC News. And just last month, a North Carolina man pleaded guilty to threatening the president after he called 911 twice from his trailer just south of the Virginia border, saying he was going to assassinate the president, the AP reported.”)

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  he election of Barack Obama was a cause for celebration in November but by September 2009 there was real worry in the country about whether the president would live out his term. The Boston Globe pointed to the media’s role in creating the atmosphere in which the assassination of the president might be committed by a deranged individual or as in the case of JFK and MLK, a conspiracy.

  September 2009 was typical. A poll conducted by a “juvenile,” appearing on Facebook, asked whether Obama should be killed. A writer for Newsmax.com, a site with connections with the Republican Party, called for a military coup against the president. Newsmax also distributed Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, a book that received almost round-the-clock coverage by the media beginning on November 15. On John King’s State of the Union, from CNN where the ex-vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was treated as a serious candidate for president come 2012, Barack Obama was ridiculed for bowing before the Emperor of Japan, with William Bennett leading the panel’s condemnation, without mentioning that President Eisenhower had bowed before General De Gaulle and that Richard Nixon had shown the same expression before Emperor Hirohito, who was the Emperor of Japan when Japan was regarded as an enemy nation! During the week film and photos surfaced showing George Bush Two holding hands with Saudi princes. Why didn’t John King mention these other bows when moderating a discussion about Obama’s bow before the Emperor of Japan? I run a zine that sometimes might receive one thousand hits in a day if we’re lucky. It’s managed by my youngest daughter. I sometimes fantasize about how formidable an outfit I would have were I to own the same kind of resources as the mainstream media. I would ask a member of my large staff—no intern could do the job—before going on to lead a discussion about Obama’s bowing before the Japanese Emperor, hey go and find whether any other president has bowed before a head of state or royalty and while you’re at it get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Was King lazy or was he instructed to treat Obama’s bowing as entertainment? I watched John King asking a panel about Barack Obama while waiting for a plane at the airport in Minneapolis.

  Some white hunters of the sort who journey into Minnesota during deer season were also watching. I could tell what they were thinking. Even though the majority of the public, sixty-seven percent, including the majority of Republicans saw nothing wrong with the president’s bowing, the media carried the controversy into the last week of November.

  Other shows also took up Obama’s bowing while treating Sarah Palin as a serious person. Mike Malloy was right when he said that while only nine percent of the public said that they’d vote for Palin, if she ran for president, she has a powerful constituency: the media. Malloy said that Palin’s appeal was her “hot ass” (Air America, November 19) and Jessica Yellin, one of King’s panelists called her a sex pot. And as if to prove their descriptions, Palin appeared on the cover of Newsweek as a sort of Playboy centerfold model with clothes. This cheesy flesh shot caused outrage among her followers who would be at a loss if you were to ask them to spell one of their buzzwords like “Constitution,” yet she posed for the photo. None of the cable networks, who reduced the president’s historic trip to China and Japan to a photo to prove that he wasn’t as manly as five-deferment and two-DUI Cheney, reported the career of Sarah Palin’s ghost writer. Gawker did:

  Lynn Vincent, the woman who is writing a book called Going Rogue “by” Sarah Palin, sure can pick her co-writers. She’s written books before with a general who kills “demons” for God and a guy who finds interracial dating “revolting.” As Charles Johnson—whose ongoing reformation from Muslim-hating wacko to right-wing apostate continues to puzzle and delight us—points out, Palin’s ghostwriter’s previous work includes Donkey Cons, a thoughtful investigative look at the Democratic Party’s criminality that blows the lid off that “killer and traitor Aaron Burr.” Vincent’s co-writer on Donkey Cons was Robert Stacy McCain, a former Washington Times editor who writes things like this:

  “[T]he media now force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly rational people react to these images with an altogether natural revulsion. The white person who does not mind transacting business with a black bank clerk may yet be averse to accepting the clerk as his sister-in-law, and THIS IS NOT RACISM, no matter what Madison Avenue, Hollywood and Washington tell us.”

  That was from a private email McCain once wrote that a recipient posted online, so in his defense, McCain (no relation to Palin’s running mate) wouldn’t write something like that in public. In public, he says things like slaves and whites in the Old South had “cordial and affectionate relations,” and is a member of the League of the South, which wants to secede from the Union (again!), and writes for a web site called VDare, which proudly publishes the work of “rational and civil… white nationalists” who “unashamedly work for their people.”

  While playing down Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke’s claim, issued during the week, that Obama and his team had helped the country to avoid depression, cable continued to cover a candidate whose dangerous rhetoric continues to ramp up death threats against the president.

  On November 16, 2009, The Christian Science Monitor reported an escalation of threats against the president’s life:

  There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

  A nice sentiment? Maybe not. The psalm reads: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

  Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

  But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

  By the beginning of winter, it was obvious that the media had become a sort of white power government in exile ready to pounce upon any of the young black president’s missteps. Not only predictable outlets like Fox News, which Obama’s advisor David Axelrod, on Sunday, October 18, 2009, defined as
less a news organization than an arm of the Republican Party, but from “progressive” outlets like Pacifica, which had begun to view gay marriage as the civil rights issue of this period, thereby accepting the post-race thinking that racism was no longer an issue in American life and when blacks suggested that it was, they were playing “the race card,” or making excuses which was the line promoted by entertainment sideshows like CNN’s Black in America, or Saving Our Children. So powerful was the media that the titular head of the Republican Party was not a politician but a talk show host with a history of drug abuse and making outlandish and racially tinged remarks about the president.

  It’s appropriate that the party of family values, which reached it’s height of power with the election of a man who contributed to the conception of a child while unmarried, and whose 2008 vice-presidential candidate was part of a family immersed in a tangle of social pathologies, be headed by a talk show host who, in the past, has had a drug problem. During this period it was revealed that Ayn Rand the Goddess of right-wing American politics was a crank addict. Lordy be!

  None of this seems to matter to media financed by multinationals that curb any discussion of the hypocrisy of those who perform on behalf of its message. David Brock says that his homosexuality didn’t matter to the Republican homophobes as long as he used his brilliance to promote their talking points.

  While Obama is the nation’s first rainbow president, put in high office by a coalition of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native-American men and women, the opposition is no longer a political one but a sort of multinational-owned electronic government-in-exile which dictates the actions of the conservative and right-wing politicians, who cower before it. First they challenged the stimulus bill, the aim of which was to keep public servants like the police, firemen and teachers on the job.

  (On October 30, 2009, it was announced that the stimulus had created and maintained more that six hundred and forty thousand jobs, 110,000 in California alone. On August 10, 2009, Paul Krugman, who had been media-appointed prime minster of a government-in-exile headed by Rush Limbaugh, wrote in The New York Times, “So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.”)

  When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of the Morning Joe challenged a wonkish recital by Sen. Jack Reid about the bill and were rebuffed; they brought in a back-up commentator, Jack Welch, the former owner of General Electric to provide an open-ended rebuttal to Reid. I needn’t remind anyone that MSNBC is owned by General Electric. (As of this writing, they’re trying to sell it.) Welch is the industry captain who noticed while visiting India that labor there was cheaper than United States labor.

  First there was chatter about Obama’s bad beginning. Neo-con David Frum said that it was “disastrous.” Over at CNN Wolf Blitzer was even suggesting that the Obama administration might be over before it began. Paul Krugman was brought on to trash Obama’s economic policies. (This is the Clinton supporter who said in February 2008 that Obama’s followers were members of a venomous cult of personality.) The cover of Newsweek had a photo of Krugman above the caption, “Obama is wrong.” By October of 2009, Krugman was defending Obama’s economic policies from the judgments of George Will and Peggy Noonan who became famous by coining the phrase “a thousand points of light.” Pat Buchanan who migrates from panel to panel on MSNBC to deliver comments that are proven wrong said that if Obama were nominated the Republican Party would rip him to pieces. When the market displayed a slump during the early days of the administration, he said that the market was sending Obama a message. Watching this hand-wringing over the Obama administration which was marked as doomed even before it had begun, one was reminded that not only did media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who donated $25,000 to right-wing sock puppet Ward Connerley’s anti-affirmative action drive, own the media but finance the think tanks from which the media draw some of their commentators and so, the morning after the stimulus bill passed, representatives from The Wall Street Journal and the right-wing Cato Institute spent three hours trashing the stimulus package while rehearsed right-wing callers accused Obama of promoting socialism.

  Like a mob trampling over one another as the doors open for an Xmas sale, it was a consensus among outlets as diverse as The Daily Beast and Fox News that the first week of February 2009, was “Obama’s Bad Week.” How did the public feel about what the media described as Obama’s bad week? The polls gave him high ratings. Gallup was sixty-nine percent, CBS, seventy-nine percent, CNN, six out of ten gave him high ratings, McClatchy Ipsos sixty-nine percent. Of course these approval ratings will fluctuate, but it was clear during this week who or where was the source of Obama’s opposition. While he might head the executive branch of government, his wealthy enemies, whose profits he wishes to diminish, and who represent a tiny fraction of public opinion, are able to magnify that tiny fraction through their ownership of the American media. At the same time Howard Kurtz and others will deny that this is happening. They will continue to claim that the media are being seduced by Obama. So now we have a situation where the media decide the outcome of elections—McCain said that they were his constituency—decide the outcome of trials before the accused has set a foot inside of a courtroom, and behave as a sort of government in exile. Something has changed in American politics when a pill-popping talk show host has become the head of a family-values political party. But in comparison to some of the fulmination rising from the margins, which was given tacit approval from the Republican Party, Limbaugh’s entertaining rants about the president were mild and of course given attention from the ratings-hungry media those voices from the fringes were given round the clock treatment by cable. Much of the hatred was fueled by Sarah Palin whose speeches inspired shouts of “kill him,” and “nigger” from her crowds. By the fall of 2009, a writer for Newsmax was wondering aloud about a military coup and The Boston Globe, in a chilling report asked whether the Secret Service was capable of protecting the president and his family.

  Under the headline: “Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention,” John L. Perry wrote:

  Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

  A poll of New Jersey voters revealed that twelve percent believed that Obama was the anti-Christ, and a large percentage of Republicans still maintained that he was born in Kenya.

  As usual, the corporate media was designing an America that was markedly different from the one that was reflected by the polls. Appearing on Morning Joe, a reporter from Rolling Stone, who unmasked the influence upon the town halls of the insurance companies, which spent three hundred and eighty million dollars in their effort to derail the health plan’s public option, was challenged by Pat Buchanan, who still maintains that his boss Richard Nixon was wronged, and Canadian-born millionaire, Mort Zukerman. Buchanan and Zukerman insisted that the corporate-manipulated town hall meetings and the 9/12 Washington demonstrations organized by tea baggers were genuine and reflected the mood of the country, which was anti big government. However, Max Blumenthal, a Nation contributor, interviewed some of the marchers. He discovered that they were ignorant of the issues and many didn’t know why they were there.

  Zukerman, who has been very critical of Obama, turned up later on Lou Dobbs’ show on CNN to criticize Obama for his attempt to have the Olympic Games in Chicago. His black employee, Errol Louis of The Daily News, who survived the purge of black reporters that occurred when Zukerman took over, agreed with his boss. Amazingly, Lewis poses as a progressive on Air America affiliate WWRL 1600.

  So insistent on Obama’s failure, the staff at Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard erupted into cheers when it was announced that the Olympic
s would not be held in the United States. The Weekly Standard had been recently purchased by a Christian fundamentalist billionaire named Phil Anschutz who makes his money in oil and real estate. When Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, NPR, in the midst of firing some of its black personnel, brought on a Weekly Standard contributor to denounce the Nobel Prize committee for awarding Obama the prize, lending credence to Kofi Natambu’s lack of confidence in NPR. So dire was the firing of blacks at NPR, which receives public funds, that the National Association of Black Journalists sent a letter. If Obama or members of his family are harmed, the same media that encouraged and in the case of Fox News, helped to organize the tea-baggers, will argue that with his policies he brought it on himself. As I predicted when asked to comment on his election by The Oakland Tribune, Obama is a centrist and to the right on some issues, but the infotainment media have cast him as a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, and a Muslim who was born in Kenya. The majority, forty-seven economists, polled by The Wall Street Journal, agreed that a recovery is underway and even Paul Krugman, who had been appointed the president’s rival, appearing on This Week in October gave the president some faint praise, and while doing so revealed his fellow panelists’ ignorance about the subject of economics. They were Peggy Noonan and George Will. On October 13, 2009, The Oakland Tribune reported a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics that “Eighty percent of economists believe that the recession is over and an expansion had begun, but they expect the recovery will be slow as worries over unemployment and high federal debt persist.” By October 30, Barack Obama and his team had saved the country from a depression yet so pathological is white supremacy that the threats against his life have increased by four hundred percent. If any harm comes to him, the same media that are creating an atmosphere where such a deed is possible will blame the president. They’ll give him some of the tough love that he and his fellow Harvard elite deal to blacks. They’ll say that because of his Marxist leanings, he brought it on himself.