Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (3 page)

Beckel later brought up several controversial comments by Corsi:

“Can I give you a couple other Corsi comments just so that people can understand the person writing this book? Corsi on Muslims: ‘Ragheads are boy-bumpers and clearly are woman-haters.'” Beckel further said, “Corsi on—you called ‘John Effing Commie Kerry. He married Teresa then he became a Jew.' You say about Hillary Clinton, ‘Fat Hog' Clinton.” Later in the discussion, Beckel asked Corsi, about his comment about Hillary Clinton. Corsi had said “Anybody asked Hillary why she couldn't stop B. J. Bill being satisfied? She's a lesbo.” Beckel asked, “When did you say that?” Corsi responded, “Bob, I never defend these comments. They're ancient history,” and claimed, “Ad hominem attacks on me are a fairly low way of trying to get to the substance of what I'm saying.” Beckel later stated, “Doctor, I have looked through a good part of your book. All I can tell you is, you say you have 600 sources. Most of those sources are people who have right-wing agendas who are against Barack Obama.” Beckel also said to Corsi: “[I]f you're holding yourself out here to be an expert on Barack Obama and say the kinds of things you've said, you have to understand why some of us question not only your standing, not only the accuracy of your book, but also your history.”

Mary Matalin, editor of the book, defended this scurrilous rubbish. The fact that she is awarded hours of TV time to criticize the president is a disgrace and shows how low Jonathan Klein, CNN president, will stoop to get ratings.

With the election of a black president, the media have become a sort of white power government in exile taking its lead from Fox News. When President Obama and his team began to treat Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party, the “mainstream” media rallied to defend Fox and even suggested that their criticism of Fox would only serve to improve Fox's ratings. Wrong again.

Eric Boehlert of
Media Matters
wrote:

…we saw nearly universal agreement among media elites that the White House decision to publicly call out Fox News was monumentally dumb, thin-skinned, short-sighted, and uncivil. [Paging the etiquette police!]

Everyone said so. Therefore pundits were certain that Fox News' ratings were way up and that Obama and his aides had made a huge tactical blunder. The ratings angle simply provided statistical ammunition for what the Beltway press corps already knew to be the truth: Fact-checking Fox News, in the immortal words of
The Washington Post
's CW-loving Sally Quinn, was “absolutely crazy.”

Except it turns out none of that was true. There was no viewer stampede toward Fox News.

From Fox, MSNBC, where a man who has a history of making racist and anti-Semitic remarks, Pat Buchanan, has been given unlimited time to criticize the president, to CNN, that features a man who designed a racist ad for Senator Jesse Helms, Alex Castellanos, and a professional scapegoater of African Americans, William Bennett, Obama faces a rogue's gallery of pundits with a history of racist comments and campaigns against blacks. Bennett was rewarded with a regular CNN spot after his remark that if you were to abort black babies the crime rate would decline (apparently unaware that seventy percent of the crimes in the U.S. are committed by whites). Relying apparently on the short memory of the American public, Bennett is allowed to criticize the president's economic plans. Bennett, a constant critic of black family values, has been exposed as such a gambling addict that his losses at one point totaled eight million dollars, which is pertinent because Republicans are always comparing the way individual citizens manage their personal budgets with the way “tax and spend” Democrats manage the government.

Glenn Beck was hired by CNN after he called the survivors of Katrina “scumbags.” Another example of how talk show culture influences politics was the announcement of the Palin-backed conservative candidate for New York's 23
rd
district congressional seat, Doug Hoffman, that Fox News host Glenn Beck was his inspiration. He lost. During the week of November 16, the Anti-Defamation League blasted Beck for his demagogic and inflammatory attacks on the president in an alarming report about the growing anti-Obama rage that is being promoted partially by the media.

Although much of the recent anti-government anger has been generated by a combination of partisan politics, grass-roots activists, and extreme groups and movements, the mainstream media has also played a role in promoting anti-government anger and pandering to people who believe that the Obama administration is illegitimate or even fascistic.

The most important mainstream media figure who has repeatedly helped to stoke the fires of anti-government anger is right-wing media host Glenn Beck, who has a TV show on FOX News and a popular syndicated radio show. While other conservative media hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, routinely attack Obama and his administration, typically on partisan grounds, they have usually dismissed or refused to give a platform to the conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists. This has not been the case with Glenn Beck. Beck and his guests have made a habit of demonizing President Obama and promoting conspiracy theories about his administration.

Much of the animus directed at Obama from Fox is meant to destroy his administration according to court documents filed by Sandra Guzman, a former Fox employee.
Gawker
reported:

The 38-page complaint was filed by former employee Sandra Guzman, and she claims she was fired in retaliation, after publicly condemning a racist cartoon published in the paper depicting President Obama as a dead chimpanzee. (…)

Guzman's complaint also states that “Charles Hurt, the
Post
's Washington D.C. Bureau Chief told Guzman that the Murdoch-owned
Post
's ‘goal is to destroy Barack Obama. We don't want him to succeed.'”

Rupert Murdoch also owns Fox News, which Fox News' Senior Vice President for Programming, Bill Shine recently admitted had the goal of being “the voice of opposition” to the Obama administration. Murdoch also stated in a recent interview that he agrees with Glenn Beck that President Obama is a racist.

The allegations in Guzman's lawsuit, if true, paint Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers and media outlets, as having a set agenda to slant news coverage to bring down the Obama administration.

When minority American journalists met at a convention in 2004, the media were termed the enemy. With the removal of black, Hispanic and Asian-American journalists from the media groups whose members voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, the president continues to be judged by all-white commentary, a punditry which includes members of the Imus Alumni, those loyal to Don Imus, who was fired for calling black female members of a basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” Howard Kurtz, David Gregory, Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan and others remained loyal to Imus until the end. And though this book is critical of Obama's chastising of African Americans, Africans, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kanye West in order to please a white constituency, the Sister Souljah strategy, I am the first to acknowledge that it took great courage for him and his family to campaign for a job that even General Colin Powell's family declined for fear of his being murdered. Just as the American media is the enemy of blacks and Latinos, Obama's candidacy and presidency have been treated with a similar hostility, (not only from the right but the left, as Bush could always count on Fox) that at least one newspaper,
Boston Globe
, has commented that through their actions they have increased the threats on the president's life. “Threatening language has also found its way into talk radio broadcasts and social networking websites, raising fears that individuals not normally considered threats to the president could be incited to violence.”

This book ends however on an optimistic note, the author having witnessed the heroic efforts of members of a younger generation in their David versus Goliath effort, by using modern and ancient techniques to combat a corporate giant, the mainstream American media in decline and continuing to poison the American mind even amidst its death groans. Jackie Jones, a reporter for
BlackAmericaWeb.com
, was on point when she said: “Cyber-news is increasingly informing traditional media coverage and providing more lenses through which to view our world.”

A niche market could be defined as a component that gives your business power. A niche market allows you to define whom you are marketing to. When you know who you are marketing to it's easy to determine where your marketing energy and dollars should be spent
.

Laura Lake
“Defining Your Niche Market
A Critical Step in Small Business Marketing”

M
any associate the term Nigger Breaker with the incidents recounted by Frederick Douglass in his autobiography,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
, where he gives an account of his beatings by a professional Nigger Breaker named Edward Covey until he fought back. Yet Nigger Breakers were not an American invention. When I visited a famous slave fort in Ghana, I was shown a dungeon where rebellious blacks were held.

I was also informed by our guide that race mixing, the American practice that has, in the minds of some, led to the rise of a new race in America, began before the ships departed from this fort. The white crew helped themselves to the female prisoners at the slave castle and probably en route to the South as well.

Though thought of as a custom that perished with the “emancipation” of blacks, Nigger Breaking persists in subtler forms. The fact that black young people are punished by the criminal justice system for crimes that, if they were committed by white youth, would be considered pranks, in the opinion of Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco, can be seen as a form of Nigger Breaking. These youth not only supply the prison industrial complex with human merchandise but capricious incarceration is a manner by which the more assertive of these youth might be chastened. The fact that two hundred thousand inmates, probably a low number, are raped in the gulags that pass as prisons is ignored even by progressives who've spent thousands of hours of air time and print space complaining about the accommodations accorded members of bin Laden's staff.

Another form of Nigger Breaking is to publicly humiliate a prominent black person as a way of sending a message to blacks, which was the assessment of MSNBC's Ed Schultz about the ratings-boosting marathon coverage of the Michael Vick case, the football player who was convicted for his part in a dog-fighting operation. Schultz is one of a handful of white on-air commentators who speaks about race with anything approaching candor. There was more coverage by the corporate media of the Vick case than that accorded the millions of deaths resulting from the embargo of Iraq, and invasions of Middle East countries.

The pillorying of ex-Washington mayor, Marion Barry, is a good example of how a prominent black individual is used to cast collective ridicule on the black male population. When I suggested in my play
Savage Wilds
that the former black mayor of Washington had been singled out for his cocaine use because cocaine was the recreational drug of Washington's political and media elite, I was called “paranoid” by Elizabeth Kastor of
The Washington Post
. Now that a number of prominent white politicians have admitted, even boasted, about their cocaine use, including two candidates for New York district attorney in the 2009 race, perhaps my diagnosis by the
Post
's reporter was premature. On October 22, Steve Kastenbaum reported on CNN that it was “no secret that cocaine was rampant on Wall Street during the 1970s and 80s,” yet a member of their CNN panel of experts, William Bennett, then Drug Czar, presented drug use as primarily a black problem, which is how CNN treated it and continues treating it. White teenagers and middle class whites being admitted to emergency rooms and overdosing on cocaine are one or two-day stories relegated to a few columns in the rear of the newspaper, while the identities of black juveniles are often exposed on television whereas those of white juveniles are pixeled out. Here again, the double standard by which the criminal justice system judges white and black crime was exposed. Most incarcerated blacks are there because of non-violent drug crimes and some are doing long terms as a result of New York State's Draconian Rockefeller drug laws.

Though, traditionally, Nigger Breakers have been white, with immigration, other groups have joined them. An example is the Mexican-American gangs who were recently busted for attempting to expel African Americans from a public housing project in Los Angeles.

And not all Nigger Breakers are thugs. Dinesh D'Souza came to prominence as one of former Treasury Secretary William Simon's counter policy wonks. Simon believed that the public debate had been overrun by radicals and that it needed to be balanced by conservative voices. D'Souza was aligned with the right-wing
The Dartmouth Review
, which reveled in sophomoric racist hi-jinks with D'Souza often joining in, nothing original, just the old racist shenanigans like mocking the black dialect.

Both he and Simon were embarrassed about defending
The Dartmouth Review
when a former president of Dartmouth, American Book Awards winner James O. Freedman, leveled charges of anti-Semitism at it. Turned out that the
Review
was guilty. After the publication of his book
The End of Racism
, which was endorsed by The American Enterprise Institute, a far-right think tank that is awarded a hefty amount of airtime by cable, two black conservatives quit the institute, one calling him the Mark Fuhrman of public policy. Mark Fuhrman was the Los Angeles policeman whose racist views were exposed during the O.J. Simpson case.

D'Souza's attacks on blacks were often silly and offensive but when he wrote a book accusing some white people of treason, some of those who had praised him greeted the book with ridicule. He'd forgotten his original assignment. Like many of those who've received good money to fault blacks for society's woes, the Jewish commentators who are silent about the abuse of Jewish women here and abroad (On October 14, 2009,
The New York Times
ran a story about child abuse in the Orthodox community: said that it had been covered up), Dinesh D' Souza has ignored the problems of those who share his ethnic background, for example, the million child prostitutes who walk the streets of Mumbai, the city of his birth. No money in it? His book,
The End Of Racism
is a blown-up scissors and paste job that is based on the idea that affirmative action is a black program, a false premise, and that blacks are at the bottom of the genetic tree, Asians and whites at the top branches, Hispanics in the middle, millions of whom are blacks, a fact about which he seems to be ignorant. And, oh yeah, there is no African Shakespeare. Well, people all over the world have story-telling traditions which include all of the techniques one associates with this art—metaphors, similes, irony, etc.—and if Dinesh wasn't so bound to the idea that a superficial knowledge of a handful of European traditions makes one smart and if he were the least bit adventuresome, he might enjoy some of it. African stories were transmitted to this hemisphere, including forms that are ancestors of such popular styles as Hip Hop. I find these stories more interesting than the work of Saul Bellow.

Of course, without the Muslims, major parts of the European traditions might have been lost, including the novel. I once thought that there was such a thing as “Eurocentrism” until I traveled to Europe (West Asia) and found things to be more complicated than what D'Souza and his hero Allan Bloom make it out to be. (Bloom's knowledge of “the ancients” was challenged by a real Greek Scholar, Martha Nussbaum, and Bloom himself was involved in a scandal involving blacks toward the end of his life. Regardless of his reckless moral behavior, exposed by his friend, Saul Bellow, in his novel
Ravelstein
, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a member of neo-con America's first family, while critical of black morals, defended Bloom.)

The intellectual mercenary and Nigger Breaker like D' Souza presents a greater danger to minorities than the street thugs who commit hate crimes. Minorities have little capability to counter the propaganda and smears that emanate from think tanks and the media, and even academia. With the firing and buyouts of minority journalists, their access to the media has been diminished even more. Unlike the hoodlums who write swastikas on the doors of synagogues or the ruffians, usually young white males, who bash gays, kill Hispanics and are acquitted by white juries with nothing like the continuing outrage that accompanied the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, the ideas of Dinesh D' Souza and Charles Murray, author of
The Bell Curve
, influence public policy. Murray is another example of a writer who redirects stereotypes from his group, in this case the Scots Irish, to blacks. When Vice President Cheney got into trouble for his joke about having Cheneys on both sides of the family and not even being from West Virginia, he was referring to the incest libel that's been aimed at the Scots Irish. Sponsors of Murray, D'Souza and John McWhorter, front man for the eugenics-minded Manhattan Institute, are funded by, in some cases, billionaires, like William Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire who is helping to fund the “grass roots” tea-bagger spectacle, and along with the media, which have billions at their disposal, have formed the main opposition to President Obama. During August 2009, the power of these money people, who have been able to buy opinion, reached an influence way beyond the dreams of William Simon. They were able to design faux grass roots organizations and demonstrations using insurance industry-backed front organizations like Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity.

Blacks have chosen many ways to fight back against the Nigger Breakers. From using the machete against whole families in Haiti or murdering a whole bunch of people like Nat Turner and his associates to using subtler ways. Barack Obama uses wit, wile and irony to embarrass the low-grade mentality of the 9/12 demonstrators, the tea baggers whose numbers have been magnified by 24/7 cable news because people yelling and screaming makes exciting television. Right-wing commentators at Fox gave those who rudely interrupted congresspersons at town halls during August of 2009 more strength than their actual numbers, and MSNBC, which is falsely cast as Fox's liberal opposition, awarded them more exposure by denouncing the demonstrations. On October 14, when a spokesperson for tea-party demonstrators said that over a million people turned out to demonstrate against the polices of the Obama administration, he wasn't challenged by Chris Matthews on whose show he appeared. The actual number was sixty thousand. While the media exaggerate the numbers of those who believe that the president was born in Kenya, Southerners mostly—while President Obama receives high favorability ratings in the rest of the country, his favorability percentage in the South is twenty-eight percent—the left has always protested the media's tendency to undercount the numbers of their demonstrations, which have, in the case of the many anti-war demonstrations, drawn hundreds of thousands. While individual gun toters and deathers were interviewed on cable, rarely did one see someone as far left as these demonstrators are far right. Indeed, demonstrators who picketed insurance companies, whose opposition to a public option has created a situation where, according to a Harvard study, forty-five thousand Americans die each year because of a lack of coverage, have been ignored.

Some of the fiercest and most hostile and racist trash has been aimed at the young president, and not only by the usual suspects, those who view the president as a monkey, a witch doctor with a bone in his nose (an image created by neurosurgeon and Fox “expert” David McKalip), and someone who would paint the White House black, or use the White House lawn to grow watermelons, but also by prominent members of the Republican Party including Sarah Palin, who was the candidate who called the president, who is a centrist, a socialist, and was the person who referred to the health plan advocated by the White House as one that would include death panels.

So desperate are the cable networks for niche-market viewers that Sarah Palin is treated as a serious person even though her demagoguery increased the threats to the president's life, and her support among the public is twenty-eight percent, a fact that seemed to have been ignored by prominent supporters of Mrs. Palin like Tina Brown and Mika Brzezinski. Sarah Palin was the designated Nigger Breaker of the McCain campaign. But as I point out in this book, during his campaign and during these months of his presidency Obama has had to maneuver through a gauntlet of Nigger Breakers—right, left, Republican and Democratic—who used the repertory of ancient stereotypes about black people against the president.

While ex-President Bush could always rely on the support of Fox and other right-wing commentators, Obama is getting it from both sides, some of his harshest criticism coming from the left, indeed the first attempt to break him came from his own party. In a manner similar to how Mary Matalin's author, swift-boater Jerome Corsi, sought to portray Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager, Mark Penn, sought to portray him as a drug user and possibly a drug dealer. After the campaign, the Clinton strategy of depicting Obama as different as the
Other
, and even a possible secret Muslim, was exposed. When asked about Obama's Muslim heritage during the campaign, Mrs. Clinton equivocated.

The McCain campaign dredged up the strategy that was used successfully against Michael Dukakis and Harold Ford, that of showing Obama as a threat to white women and white children. The New Jersey Republican Party even tried to tie him to O.J. Simpson. Not only did Obama become the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the national psychiatrist or someone like Jesus expelling the demons from the mad man he had encountered at Gardarenes. It was as though some of his opponents were like some mentally disturbed person writing his sentiments on the walls of a padded cell with his feces.

As usual the corporate media was the mob leader. For the media, Obama can't win for losing and often the right wing sets the agenda for the mainstream media.