Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (2 page)

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.”

From Monday to Friday, October 26 through 30, 2009, there was good news for the economy. It was announced that that the stimulus plan had saved or created 640,000 jobs. (On November 30, Paul Krugman, media-designated Obama critic and Nobel Prize winning economist, had to admit that, “Basically, we started out with a year that matched the Great Depression, but have since pulled back a bit from the edge of the abyss.”) Ford Motor Company announced a profit of nearly a billion dollars due partially to the administration's “cash for clunkers” program. Home buying increased by 6.1 percent, the most since 2006. Construction spending rose. Manufacturing grew for the third straight month. The GDP came in at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009. A few weeks later GM announced that it would repay the government's bailout money five years ahead of schedule.

This news didn't diminish the steady flow of criticism emanating from Obama's adversaries on talk shows and panels that aired the following Sunday—shows that have been criticized over the years for lacking black representation or for using tokens. On
Meet The Press
it was Tavis Smiley, who had been outed by a blog called
TheRoot
for being the advance man for Wells Fargo in its successful attempt to sell toxic mortgage loans to inner city residents. He said that maybe those who during the campaign said that Barack Obama lacked the experience to be president were right. Appearing on CNN's
State of the Union
, on Sunday, Mary Matalin ridiculed the president's programs and repeated the GOP talking point that the public was opposed to the administration's public option plan, even though there was a consensus among those polled that the majority of the public was for it. (On the following Monday, William Kristol, a guest on
The Washington Journal
, echoed Matalin's talking point and was also allowed to create an “American public” that rivaled that reflected in the polls, without being challenged by the moderator.) Ms. Matalin's presence on a panel on which the majority followed the line introduced by
Saturday Night Live
, a comedy show, was an example of how even Obama's fiercest enemies are given time to weigh in on the president's alleged failure.

Saturday Night Live
, on October 3, opened with Fred Armisen as President Obama, delivering an address from the Oval Office. “When you look at my record,” he said, “it's very clear what I've done so far, and that is nothing.” During the following week and months the show, a comedy show mind you, was cited around the clock as proof that President Obama hadn't accomplished anything.

Whether this was a result of journalistic lethargy, an unwillingness to consult the facts, or whether it was talking points required of pundits by the media owners, the
Saturday Night Live
writers—who tend to be white—were wrong. What are the facts?
The St. Petersburg Times
' PolitiFact.com's Truth-O-Meter listed promises that Obama had made. They included:

Did nothing? All of these promises were kept. Yet, the mainstream cable news channels used the
Saturday Night Live
comic interpretation as a hook that was even picked up by progressives. Typical was Ed Schultz, of Air America, who criticized Obama for his lack of “aggression,” with the knowledge that a black “aggressive” president becomes to his enemies an “angry black man” and one who, as Glenn Beck of Fox said, hates white people. On November 9, 2009, Keith Olbermann cited an interview conducted with Rupert Murdoch by an Australian newspaper during which Rupert Murdoch agreed with Glenn Beck that Obama was a racist.) If criticism of Obama from the white right and mainstream weren't enough, some of Obama's harshest criticisms came from
The Huffington Post
,
Salon.com
and Air America which, on November 5, invited listeners to judge Obama's first year. Most of the respondents and the guest host Nicole Sandler gave him a failing grade. She gave her opinion that Bush was a more effective president, an idea offered by comedian Bill Maher, begrudgingly, yet fifty-seven percent of Americans polled during that November period held that Obama was more effective than Bush.

That afternoon, progressive talk show host Ed Schultz's guest was an admitted conservative who trashed Obama's economic program, a program that most economists credited with having saved the country from a depression.

The left said that they wanted Obama to be more like Lyndon Johnson, forgetting apparently that Johnson's aggressive foreign policy got him into trouble. Brent Budowsky of
The Hill
was brought on by progressive Air America to criticize Obama's performance during his first year in office. Go to
The Hill
website and one will find the black point of view represented by two right-wingers Ron Christie and Armstrong Williams, former aide to Strom Thurmond, a segregationist everywhere but in bed. (On November 16,
The New York Times
acknowledged that the criticism of Obama was coming from both the right and the left.) Accompanying the photo was that of three hosts, one of whom plays liberal, Chris Matthews, and two progressives, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, all-white. In the same section was an article about
Newsweek
's problems. All three executives pictured were white including the managing editor, Jon Meecham, who believes that the country is center right (even though it rejected John McCain, who campaigned from the center right) and that Billy Graham looks like God.

After Democratic losses in November 2009 in Virginia and New Jersey, the segregated media was once again speaking of Obama's bad week and the failure of his administration and pronouncing victory for the tea-baggers whose challenge to the Republican establishment led to the election of the first Democratic congressman from New York's 23
rd
district in over one hundred years. Even with losses in both New Jersey and Virginia, where the candidate for governor ran as an Obama Republican, Obama's poll numbers remained high.

Despite the encouraging news of the week ending on October 30, the Sunday show panels, which have been criticized for their lack of minority representation, continued their yearlong criticism of the Obama administration. Much attention was given to Senator Joseph Lieberman, who threatened to block health legislation if a public option were included. The commentators didn't reveal that Lieberman has received over two million dollars from the insurance industry and that his wife has lobbied on behalf of the health insurance industry. After making predictions about Obama's failures—predictions that weren't borne out—you'd think that members of the Jim Crow media fraternity would be more cautious. For weeks they were predicting that a health bill would come out of the House, minus public option. A bill with a public option passed the House despite the prediction of a CNN newswoman who, the night before, predicted that it wouldn't.

Though few black women reporters and commentators are seen on television, white women are plentiful both on national and local television. They are among those who appear on camera to lash out at Obama. I've mentioned Mary Matalin, editor of one of the most abominable books about the president. She receives gentle treatment when she is brought on to comment about the president's alleged failures. This woman worked for Dick Cheney who advocated the torture of prisoners and is suspected of outing a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, a treasonable offense. During the August 5, 2008 edition of Fox News'
Fox & Friends
, Fox News contributor Bob Beckel said to Jerome Corsi, author of the book
The Obama Nation
, edited by Matalin:

“You said that Barack Obama supported a bill that allowed mothers to kill their babies even after they were born. Now, were they gonna use knives, guns, or how were they gonna do that? And do you actually believe that to be true?” Corsi responded, “Well, it's true,” and asserted that “Obama, on the floor of the Illinois state Senate, said that woman had an absolute right to abortion, to kill the baby even if it survived that abortion.” In fact, during the floor debate on the bill Corsi was discussing—which opponents said was unnecessary, as the Illinois criminal code unequivocally prohibits killing children, and said that it posed a threat to abortion rights—Obama never said any such thing, as
Media Matters
noted in response to similar false claims by Corsi in several media appearances.