Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (8 page)

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 to 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?'”

This remark explains why Fox continued to portray Obama as a terrorist.

Later, during the debate over health legislation, Fox News was responsible for spreading false information about the legislation. On October 20, 2009, indefatigable media watcher, Richard Prince, cited a Pew Poll.

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, reporting on the health-care reform bills in Congress, reported in August that ‘Among those who say they regularly get their news from Fox News, 45 percent say claims of death panels are true, while 30 percent say they are not true. By contrast, majorities among regular viewers of rival cable news channels MSNBC and CNN and nightly network news say they think it is false that health care legislation will create “death panels.” There are no such “death panels” in the legislation.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that the same misinformation took hold among Fox News viewers about whether the health-care plan will cover illegal immigrants.

Richard Prince also cited Jacob Weisberg on Fox. “Weisberg argues in
Newsweek
that ‘What matters is the way that Fox's model has invaded the bloodstream of the American media. By showing that ideologically distorted news can drive ratings,' Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes ‘has provoked his rivals at CNN and MSNBC to develop a variety of populist and ideological takes on the news. In this way, Fox hasn't just corrupted its own coverage. Its example has made all of cable news unpleasant and unreliable.'” CNN wasn't much better. On Sunday, October 18, during a panel discussion, David Gergen, a Washington insider tried to explain why the public was against the public option. The next day, Monday, an ABC/Washington poll reported that fifty-seven percent of the public supported a public option.

The candidacy of this Celtic-African-American president drew the racist poisons from the American psyche and they crawled out like the slime that oozes from the innards of those victims in the Exorcist movies. Examples:

· A sign was posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Obama's name and the offer of a “free public hanging.”

· In North Carolina, racist graffiti targeting Obama was found in a tunnel near the North Carolina State University campus.

· In a Maine convenience store, an Associated Press reporter saw a sign inviting customers to join a betting pool on when Obama might fall victim to an assassin. The sign solicited one-dollar entries into “The Osama Obama Shotgun Pool,” saying the money would go to the person picking the date closest to when Obama was attacked. “Let's hope we have a winner,” said the sign. A law enforcement official who also spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly said that during the campaign there was a spike in anti-Obama rhetoric on the Internet—“a lot of ranting and raving with no capability, credibility or specificity to it.”

· In Denver, a group of men with guns and bulletproof vests made racist threats against Obama and sparked fears of an assassination plot during the Democratic National Convention in August 2008.

· Just before the election, two skinheads in Tennessee were charged with plotting to behead blacks across the country and assassinate Obama while wearing white top hats and tuxedos.

· In Milwaukee, police officials found a poster of Obama with a bullet going toward his head—discovered on a table in a police station.

One of the most popular white-supremacist Web sites got more than two thousand new members the day after the election, compared with ninety-one new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site,
stormfront.org
, was temporarily off-line November 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, “I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how ‘messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed.” The taunts and threats continue.

Despite these threats, pundits continue to complain that the media were giving Obama a free ride. Howard Kurtz, Lou Dobbs, Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson and other pundits kept up the mantra that Obama had caused the media to “swoon” over Obama, while giving Sarah Palin and John McCain a hard time. Studies from the Shorenstein Center, George Mason University and LexisNexis concluded otherwise. As late as Sunday, December 28, Kurtz was continuing to describe the media's attitude toward Barack Obama as “sympathetic,” and none of his fellow panelists Jessica Yellin, Terence Smith, Bill Pressman and Amy Holmes challenged him. Ms. Holmes, a Zambia-born black woman whom the network bosses shuttle from panel to panel for the purpose of dissing the black underclass and Barack Obama, agreed. (Once in awhile she is handled by the fellows over at
The National Review
where she was brought on to diss Obama. She said of Obama's race speech, at their site,
National Review
Online
: “My first reaction? Race speeches are rarely good, and this was no exception. For all of Obama's new talk of change, courage, politics you can believe in, I heard a whole lot of liberal boilerplate dressed up in euphemism and offering no fresh solutions.”)

Studies by reputable organizations, whose goal is not that of drawing ratings by putting down blacks, differ from the conclusions about the media treatment of Obama. On July 27, 2008, James Rainey, writer for the
Los Angeles Times
wrote:

Cable talking heads accuse broadcast networks of liberal bias—but a think tank finds that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Barack Obama than on John McCain in recent weeks. Haters of the mainstream media reheated a bit of conventional wisdom last week.

Barack Obama, they said, was getting a free ride from those insufferable liberals.