Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  In October, Fox’s John Stossel actually appeared before audiences where he opposed what his sponsor, Americans for Prosperity, called a government insurance plan. The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote:

  This was conservatives’ seething summer of discontent and unhinged hysteria: town halls, tea parties and tirades. They captured headlines and gained momentum. Misinformation ran amuck. President Obama’s approval ratings tumbled. Through it all, Obama maintained a Pollyannaish, laissez-faire disposition. Some found this worrisome. Others, like me, even thought it weak. But maybe not so fast.

  According to Gallup poll results released on Wednesday, the president’s approval rating has stopped falling and has leveled out in the low-50 percents, about the same as Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s at this point in their presidencies (both two-termers, lest we forget).

  An example of how the media have presented a few loud demonstrators to represent the thinking of the public occurred on October 13. After a conservative health bill passed a Senate committee, CNN’s Tom Foreman used footage of the same tea baggers rudely interrupting congresspersons to announce that the public was against the legislation. This was the theme of the cable shows and even Sunday talk shows that feign seriousness. On this issue and others the wealthy individuals who lurk behind the talk show screamers and who obey a gentleman’s agreement not to criticize each other, use their ownership of the airwaves to construct a false reality. They got us coming and going. Not only do they own the media, but finance the think tank “policy analysts” who are frequent guests on their shows. This is why Obama continues to be judged by all-white panels on CNN’s State of the Union, ABC’s This Week, C-Span’s The Washington Journal, which provides a service by exposing the abysmal ignorance of some Americans each day, Fox News Sunday, NBC’s Meet The Press and CBS’s Face The Nation. Given the dearth of those who share the background of those constituencies that voted overwhelmingly for Obama, blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and others, President Obama will continue to be judged by an all-white, mostly male, middle-aged jury, some of whom like Alex Castellanos, have designed racist campaigns and others like Mary Matalin who have shepherded scurrilous swift-boat styled propaganda campaigns against the president, and David Gregory, who defended Don Imus’s racist outbursts until the very end. On the morning of November 8, 2009, after the House passed a health bill that included a public option, after pundits of the left predicted that it wouldn’t up until the night before it passed, David Brooks, one of the most powerful of the country’s pundits, with a column in The New York Times, was brought on to Imus-defender David Gregory’s show, Meet The Press, to criticize the president on an all-white (one woman) panel. David Brooks is a neo-con who backed the invasion of Iraq, a multi-trillion-dollar calamity, yet complains about the president’s fiscal policies. He says his mentor is the late Irving Kristol and wrote that Bush won in 2004 because he carried states with high “white fertility rates” those who wanted to escape “vulgarity.”

  How did the public feel about those who shouted down the proponents of health care legislation at the town meetings and who were boosted by the Infotainment media?

  Most Americans say the tone of the debate has been negative. According to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted September 11-14 among 1,003 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 53 percent say the tone of the debate over health care has been generally rude and disrespectful; 31 percent say it has been generally polite and respectful and 16 percent do not offer an opinion. Among those who say the debate has been rude and disrespectful, most believe that opponents of the health care legislation under consideration are to blame. By a 59 percent to 17 percent margin, more blame opponents than supporters of the legislation; 17 percent volunteer that both groups are to blame. (Pew Research Center, 16 September 2009)

  The Huffington Post discovered that one of CNN’s panel regulars was in the insurance business. Alex Castellanos, a right-wing Cuban American. This is the same man who designed the ad showing a black hand taking a job from a white hand, an anti-affirmative action ad, which led to the defeat of a black senatorial candidate, yet CNN uses him to comment on the actions of a black president. If that were not enough, in October it was revealed that Castellanos’ firm actually created ads on behalf of the insurance industry that was spending over three hundred million dollars, according to London’s Guardian, to defeat the public option.

  Alex Castellanos is a regular CNN contributor, but one of Castellanos’ secret identities is being the media buyer for one of the ad campaigns bankrolled by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a major industry trade group fighting strenuously against health care reform. Castellanos was responsible for placing more than $1 million of AHIP advertising in five states.

  CNN said that they didn’t know about his ties to the insurance industry.

  With the exception of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, very rarely did the cable networks mention that the insurance industry spent millions to stage these demonstrations. The Guardian put the amount at over three hundred fifty million dollars.

  The industry and interest groups have spent $380m (£238m) in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying, advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totaling close to $1.5m, has gone to the chairman of the senate committee drafting the new law.

  Barack Obama made a speech in Africa, criticizing African governments for taking bribes. Over here, we call them “campaign contributions.”

  If cable had been around during the Eisenhower administration, leaders of fringe groups like the John Birch Society would have been given equal time with administration officials. Joe McCarthy would have been designated as the Republican Party’s leader. Next to Joe Wilson, McCarthy was eloquent. All Wilson had to do for cable to grant him prominence was to call the president a liar during the president’s speech to Congress, which was like taking a piss in public.

  The dilemma faced by black intellectuals like me who are sometimes critical of Obama is similar to that faced by some Israeli intellectuals whom I met during my second trip to Israel. Though they found Ariel Sharon’s policies abhorrent—given the opposition to the former prime minister by outsiders—they found themselves supporting the odious prime minster.

  When blacks see people showing up at Obama rallies with guns and the ugly racist signs aimed at the president; when they are informed of “The Obama Effect,” a phrase for the unprecedented arming of whites throughout the nation, and when they are assaulted by a media for which the president can’t win for losing—a sort of electronic white-power government in exile—a Republican Party and other assorted Nigger Breakers, who have raised the vilest and most salacious attacks on the president since that directed at Abraham Lincoln by the Confederate media, they find themselves rallying behind one of their own.

  Going Old South on Obama

  Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man2

  (Black public intellectuals and politicians accused the Clinton campaign of using racist tactics against Barack Obama. The Clintons denied the accusation and the media backed them up. But after the campaign, a report about the Clinton strategy was published and it showed that the aim of the campaign was to paint Obama as different. As someone who was not like us. Mark Penn’s campaign memo of March 19, 2007 was printed in the August 11, 2008 issue of The Atlantic:

  More than anything else, this memo captures the full essence of Mark Penn’s campaign strategy—its brilliance and its breathtaking attacks. Penn identified with impressive specificity the very coalition of women and blue-collar workers that Clinton ended up winning a year later. But he also called Obama “unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun,” and wrote, “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn proposed targeting Obama’s “lack of American roots.”

  Th
eir effort to break Obama failed, but Clinton supporters’ insistence upon painting Clinton as a martyr or someone who was cheated out of the nomination led to the rise of Sarah Palin.)

  D

  uring Bill Clinton’s first run for president, I appeared on a New York radio panel with some of his black supporters, including Paul Robeson, Jr., son of the actor and singer. I said that Clinton had character problems. They dismissed my comments and said that I didn’t know anything about politics and should stick to writing novels. (Clarence Page, who has a monopoly on the few column inches and airtime made available to black columnists by the corporate media, said the same thing about me. I should stick to creative writing and leave politics alone.)

  These criticisms didn’t deter me. Writing in The Baltimore Sun, I was the first to identify Clinton as a black president as a result of his mimicking a black style. (I said he was the second, since Warren G. Harding never denied the rumors about his black ancestry.) As a result of his ability to imitate the black preaching style, Clinton was able to seduce black audiences, who ignored some of his actions that were unfriendly, even hostile to blacks. His interrupting his campaign to get a mentally disabled black man, Ricky Ray Rector executed. (Did Mrs. Clinton tear up about this act?) His humiliation of Jesse Jackson. His humiliation of Jocelyn Elders and Lani Guinier. The welfare reform bill that has left thousands of women black, white, yellow and brown destitute, prompted Robert Scheer to write in the San Francisco Chronicle, “To his everlasting shame as president, Clinton supported and signed welfare legislation that shredded the federal safety net for the poor from which he personally had benefited.” (Has Mrs. Clinton shed a tear for these women, or did she oppose her husband’s endorsement of this legislation?) His administration saw a high rate of black incarceration as a result of Draconian drug laws that occurred during his regime. He advocated trade agreements that sent thousands of jobs overseas. (Did Mrs. Clinton, with misty eyes, beg him to assess how such trade deals would affect the livelihood of thousands of families, black, white, brown, red and yellow?) He refused to intervene to rescue thousands of Rwandans from genocide. (Did Mrs. Clinton tearfully beseech her husband to intervene on behalf of her African sisters; did Ms. Gloria Steinem, whose word is so influential among millions of white women that she can be credited by some for changing the outcome of a primary, and maybe an election, marshal these forces to place pressure upon Congress to rescue these black women and girls?) President Clinton also repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, which permitted the kind of wildcat speculation that has led to millions of Americans losing billions in equity.

  Carl Bernstein, appearing on Air America Radio on January 9, 2008, described Clinton’s New Hampshire attacks on Obama as “petulant.” Bill Clinton’s behavior demonstrated that regardless of his admiration for jazz, and black preaching, he and his spouse will go South on a black man whom they perceive as being audacious enough to sass Mrs. Clinton. In this respect, he falls in the tradition of the southern demagogue: grinning with and sharing pot likker and cornbread with black folks, while signifying about them before whites. Though his role models are Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy, he has more in common with Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge (The Wild Man From Sugar Creek), Louisiana’s Huey Long, and his brother Earl, Edwin Edwards, who even hinted that he had black ancestry to gain black votes, Alabama’s George Wallace, Texas’s Pa Ferguson, and “Kissing Jim” Folsom, who wrote, You Are My Sunshine. He employs the colorful rhetoric of the southern demagogue, the rustic homilies (“till the last dog dies”), the whiff of corruption.

  Having been educated at elite schools where studying the War of the Roses was more important than studying Reconstruction, the under-educated white male punditry and their token white women failed to detect the racial code phrases that both Clintons and their surrogates sent out—codes that, judging from their responses, infuriated blacks, caught immediately. Blacks have been deciphering these hidden messages for four hundred years. They had to in order to survive.

  Gloria Steinem perhaps attended the same schools. Her remark that black men received the vote “fifty years before women,” in a New York Times Op-Ed (January 8, 2008), which some say contributed to Obama’s defeat in New Hampshire, ignores the fact that black men were met by white terrorism, including massacres, and economic retaliation when attempting to exercise the franchise. She and her followers, who’ve spent thousands of hours in graduate school, must have gotten all of their information about Reconstruction from Gone With The Wind, where moviegoers are asked to sympathize with a proto-feminist, Scarlett O’Hara, who finally has to fend for herself after years of being doted upon by the unpaid household help. Booker T. Washington, an educator born into slavery, said that young white people had been waited on so that after the war they didn’t know how to take care of themselves, and Mary Chesnutt, author of The Civil War Diaries, and a friend of Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s family, said that upper class Southern white women were so slave dependent that they were “indolent.” Steinem and her followers should read, Redemption, The Last Battle Of The Civil War, by Nicholas Lemann, which tells the story about how “in 1875, an army of white terrorists in Mississippi led a campaign to ‘redeem’ their state—to abolish with violence and murder if need be, the newly won civil rights of freed slaves and blacks.” Such violence and intimidation was practiced all over the South sometimes resulting in massacres. One of the worst massacres of black men occurred at Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. Their crime? Attempting to exercise the voting rights awarded to them “fifty years” before white women received theirs. Lemann writes “burning Negroes” met “savage and hellish butchery.”

  They were all killed, unarmed, at close range, while begging for mercy. Those who tried to escape, were overtaken, mustered in crowds, made to stand around, and, while in every attitude of humiliation and supplication, were shot down and their bodies mangled and hacked to hasten their death or to satiate the hellish malice of their heartless murderers, even after they were dead.

  White posses on horseback rode away from the town, looking for Negroes who had fled, so they could kill them.

  Elsewhere in the South, during the Confederate Restoration, black politicians, who were given the right to vote “fifty years before white women,” were removed from office by force, many through violence. In Wilmington, North Carolina, black men, who “received the vote fifty years before white women,” are the subject of Charles Chesnutt’s great novel, The Marrow of Tradition:

  On Thursday, November 10, 1898, Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, a Democratic leader in Wilmington, North Carolina mustered a white mob to retaliate for a controversial editorial written by Alexander Manly, editor of the city’s black newspaper, the Daily Record. The mob burned the newspaper’s office and incited a bloody race riot in the city. By the end of the week, at least fourteen black citizens were dead, and much of the city’s black leadership had been banished. This massacre further fueled an ongoing statewide disfranchisement campaign designed to crush black political power. Contemporary white chronicles of the event, such as those printed in the Raleigh News and Observer and Wilmington’s the Morning Star, either blamed the African-American community for the violence or justified white actions as necessary to keep the peace. African-American writers produced their own accounts—including fictional examinations—that countered these white supremacist claims and highlighted the heroic struggles of the black community against racist injustice.

  Black congressmen, who, as a rule, were better educated than their white colleagues were expelled from Congress.

  Either Gloria Steinem hasn’t done her homework or, as an ideologue, rejects evidence that’s a Google away, and the patriarchal corporate old media, which has appointed her the spokesperson for feminism, permits her ignorance to run rampant over the emails and blogs of the nation and though this white Oprah might have inspired her followers to march lockstep behind her, a progressive like Cindy Sheehan wasn’t convinced. She called Mrs. Clinton’s cry
ing act, “phony.”

  Moreover, some of the suffragettes that she and her followers hail as feminist pioneers were racists. Some even endorsed the lynching of black men. In an early clash between a black and white feminist, anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells opposed the views of Frances Willard, a suffragette pioneer, who advocated lynching.

  As the president of one of America’s foremost social reform organizations, Frances Willard called for the protection of the purity of white womanhood from threats to morality and safety. In her attempts to bring Southern women into the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard accepted the rape myth and publicly condoned lynching and the color line in the South. Wells argued that as a Christian reformer, Willard should be speaking out against lynching, but instead seemed to support the position of Southerners.