Ishmael Reed - Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media - The Return of the Nigger Breakers

They also did an ad in which Obama was linked to a movie made in 1956, starring Charlton Heston.

If I were to cast Obama in a movie, I would have him fighting through a crowd of flesh-eating zombies and the lead zombie would be labeled “the media.”

How did I feel about the ads? Some years ago, a clique of white students tried to needle me by writing racially offensive stories. I told them that they could write all of the racist material that they desired as long as they made it fresh and original. That ended their efforts. The ringleader finally came to my office and confessed that I reminded him of his father.

How Lee Atwater Perfected the GOP’s Appeal to Racism7

(The founder of the dirty tactics that were used by Bush One in the infamous Willie Horton campaign was the late Lee Atwater. In 2008, filmmaker Stefan Forbes approached me to appear in a film about Atwater.)

One of the founders of the neo-Confederate organization called the League of the South, which will probably renew its call for secession of the southern states if Barack Obama wins, was the late Grady McWhiney. In his book, Cracker Culture, Celtic Ways of the Old (University of Alabama, 1988), he traced “cracker” to the Gaelic word craic —still used in Ireland and anglicized in spelling to “crack”—and said it meant “entertaining conversation.” (According to The New York Times , folk etymology had had it that cracker came from cracking or pounding corn, or using whips to drive cattle.) He was quoted in the Irish Literary Supplement .

Celts and Southerners, in Dr. McWhiney’s view, are pastoral groups with a taste for gambling, drinking, “raucous music,” dancing, hunting, fishing and horse and dog racing. They are lazier than the English and Northerners and cling to an easily offended sense of honor, naturally linked to “a propensity to violence.”… He resigned from the League of The South complaining that it had been taken over by “the dirty fingernail crowd.”

I learned first hand about how the media buckled under when self-described crackers seized the Republican Party. The kind of people who even use hot sauce on ice cream. Who, like South Carolinian Lee Atwater, love black culture, especially the “raucous” music Rock and Roll, but have issues with its creators. (In this tradition, check out Sarah Palin’s hands-in-the-air moves on the October 25, 2008 Saturday Night Live .)

During the administration of Bush One, I was invited to do commentaries on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered . After the infamous Willie Horton ad ran, an ad that criticized a Massachusetts program that led to the furlough of a black rapist and murderer, Willie Horton, and an ad that some contend caused the defeat of Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, I wrote a commentary about how the ad would backfire on Bush One and on Lee Atwater. The commentary was rejected and that was the end of my career as a commentator on NPR. Atwater also employed tactics that were used earlier by Richard Nixon, one of his admirers, and are being used in the current campaign by Senator McCain. Painting one’s opponent as unpatriotic (a socialist, even) and packaging his wealthy clients as ordinary Joes, like Bush One pretending to enjoy pork rinds and cowboy boots. Atwater’s playing of the media is also a current strategy.

A number of news entertainers have repeated the McCain charge that the media are in the tank for Obama. Two academic studies and one by LexisNexis have disputed the media’s supposed love of Obama. I watched three hours of Morning Joe on October 20, 2008. Much of the time was spent analyzing General Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama and debating whether it was given because both were black.

Pat Buchanan, member of the media that’s so cozy with Barack Obama, is on MSNBC all day championing the cause of Senator McCain. During this show he joined Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz, and others who believe that the media love Obama. An Obama representative was riddled with questions, while Rick Davis, McCain’s man and Atwater impersonator, wasn’t questioned at all. The male commentators expressed their having the hots for hot Sarah Palin without mentioning Troopergate. Even Lawrence O’Donnell was panting about the vice-presidential candidate’s measurements.

William Ayers of the 1960s Weathermen was brought up without reference to the support for projects on which Ayers and Obama worked from the Annenberg family, a Republican family that supports McCain. None of the media has followed up on Obama’s listing of Republicans and conservatives who served on the same board as Ayers and Obama. On October 24, 2008, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski chided The New York Times for suggesting that there were hints of racism in John McCain’s campaign. I suppose they missed the ad coupling Barack Obama with Paris Hilton and Rudolph Giuliani’s playing of the Willie Horton card.

Here’s the script of a Giuliani’s Robocall:

Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I’m calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers. It’s true, I read Obama’s words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals — trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can’t trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies.

(With this appeal, Giuliani was up to his old tricks as the racial divider, an appeal he would later use in the 2009 mayoral race in which he supported Mayor Bloomberg against a black candidate and an appeal for which he was chided by Times columnist, Bob Herbert. The media emboldened Giuliani by supporting the myth that the administration of black mayor David Dinkins was a failure during which crime was permitted to flourish. A belated revisionist assessment of Dinkins appeared in The New York Times . Also, ignoring the criticisms of the mayor’s actions on 9/11 by firemen and those who lost loved ones during the attack, the corporate media crowned Giuliani, whose support among New Yorkers was forty percent prior to the catastrophe, “mayor of the world.”)

Walter Isaacson, appearing on this typical all-white cable panel adjudicating what’s racist and what’s not, agreed with Mika and Joe about the Times charge against McCain.

This is the same Walter Isaacson who traveled to the headquarters of David Horowitz, an ideological thug, and begged forgiveness after Jack White called Horowitz a racist. Mika Brzezinski chimed in that it’s hard to run against an African-American candidate, which probably explains Governor Tom Bradley and Senators Harvey Gantt and Harold Ford.

The fact that we hear more about Rev. Wright than the preacher who embraces John McCain, Rev. Hagee, is an example of how the right has intimidated the media. For the same reason, we hear more about Bill Ayers than about Sarah Palin’s ties to an Alaska outfit that advocates secession, the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) whose founder, Joe Vogler, made comments that in comparison make those fulminations of Rev. Wright, a former Marine, seem tame. Rosa Brooks of The Los Angeles Times (September 4, 2008) writes of Sarah Palin’s palling around with secessionists:

Over the years, Palin has actively courted the Alaska Independence Party, or AIP, an organization that supports Alaskan secession from the U.S. To be clear, we’re not necessarily talking about friendly secession either: As the AIP’s founder, Joe Vogler, told an interviewer in 1991: “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. … And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”