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

It’s appropriate that the party of family values, which reached it’s height of power with the election of a man who contributed to the conception of a child while unmarried, and whose 2008 vice-presidential candidate was part of a family immersed in a tangle of social pathologies, be headed by a talk show host who, in the past, has had a drug problem. During this period it was revealed that Ayn Rand the Goddess of right-wing American politics was a crank addict. Lordy be!

None of this seems to matter to media financed by multinationals that curb any discussion of the hypocrisy of those who perform on behalf of its message. David Brock says that his homosexuality didn’t matter to the Republican homophobes as long as he used his brilliance to promote their talking points.

While Obama is the nation’s first rainbow president, put in high office by a coalition of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native-American men and women, the opposition is no longer a political one but a sort of multinational-owned electronic government-in-exile which dictates the actions of the conservative and right-wing politicians, who cower before it. First they challenged the stimulus bill, the aim of which was to keep public servants like the police, firemen and teachers on the job.

(On October 30, 2009, it was announced that the stimulus had created and maintained more that six hundred and forty thousand jobs, 110,000 in California alone. On August 10, 2009, Paul Krugman, who had been media-appointed prime minster of a government-in-exile headed by Rush Limbaugh, wrote in The New York Times , “So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.”)

When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of the Morning Joe challenged a wonkish recital by Sen. Jack Reid about the bill and were rebuffed; they brought in a back-up commentator, Jack Welch, the former owner of General Electric to provide an open-ended rebuttal to Reid. I needn’t remind anyone that MSNBC is owned by General Electric. (As of this writing, they’re trying to sell it.) Welch is the industry captain who noticed while visiting India that labor there was cheaper than United States labor.

First there was chatter about Obama’s bad beginning. Neo-con David Frum said that it was “disastrous.” Over at CNN Wolf Blitzer was even suggesting that the Obama administration might be over before it began. Paul Krugman was brought on to trash Obama’s economic policies. (This is the Clinton supporter who said in February 2008 that Obama’s followers were members of a venomous cult of personality.) The cover of Newsweek had a photo of Krugman above the caption, “Obama is wrong.” By October of 2009, Krugman was defending Obama’s economic policies from the judgments of George Will and Peggy Noonan who became famous by coining the phrase “a thousand points of light.” Pat Buchanan who migrates from panel to panel on MSNBC to deliver comments that are proven wrong said that if Obama were nominated the Republican Party would rip him to pieces. When the market displayed a slump during the early days of the administration, he said that the market was sending Obama a message. Watching this hand-wringing over the Obama administration which was marked as doomed even before it had begun, one was reminded that not only did media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who donated $25,000 to right-wing sock puppet Ward Connerley’s anti-affirmative action drive, own the media but finance the think tanks from which the media draw some of their commentators and so, the morning after the stimulus bill passed, representatives from The Wall Street Journal and the right-wing Cato Institute spent three hours trashing the stimulus package while rehearsed right-wing callers accused Obama of promoting socialism.

Like a mob trampling over one another as the doors open for an Xmas sale, it was a consensus among outlets as diverse as The Daily Beast and Fox News that the first week of February 2009, was “Obama’s Bad Week.” How did the public feel about what the media described as Obama’s bad week? The polls gave him high ratings. Gallup was sixty-nine percent, CBS, seventy-nine percent, CNN, six out of ten gave him high ratings, McClatchy Ipsos sixty-nine percent. Of course these approval ratings will fluctuate, but it was clear during this week who or where was the source of Obama’s opposition. While he might head the executive branch of government, his wealthy enemies, whose profits he wishes to diminish, and who represent a tiny fraction of public opinion, are able to magnify that tiny fraction through their ownership of the American media. At the same time Howard Kurtz and others will deny that this is happening. They will continue to claim that the media are being seduced by Obama. So now we have a situation where the media decide the outcome of elections — McCain said that they were his constituency — decide the outcome of trials before the accused has set a foot inside of a courtroom, and behave as a sort of government in exile. Something has changed in American politics when a pill-popping talk show host has become the head of a family-values political party. But in comparison to some of the fulmination rising from the margins, which was given tacit approval from the Republican Party, Limbaugh’s entertaining rants about the president were mild and of course given attention from the ratings-hungry media those voices from the fringes were given round the clock treatment by cable. Much of the hatred was fueled by Sarah Palin whose speeches inspired shouts of “kill him,” and “nigger” from her crowds. By the fall of 2009, a writer for Newsmax was wondering aloud about a military coup and The Boston Globe , in a chilling report asked whether the Secret Service was capable of protecting the president and his family.

Under the headline: “Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention,” John L. Perry wrote:

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

A poll of New Jersey voters revealed that twelve percent believed that Obama was the anti-Christ, and a large percentage of Republicans still maintained that he was born in Kenya.

As usual, the corporate media was designing an America that was markedly different from the one that was reflected by the polls. Appearing on Morning Joe , a reporter from Rolling Stone, who unmasked the influence upon the town halls of the insurance companies, which spent three hundred and eighty million dollars in their effort to derail the health plan’s public option, was challenged by Pat Buchanan, who still maintains that his boss Richard Nixon was wronged, and Canadian-born millionaire, Mort Zukerman. Buchanan and Zukerman insisted that the corporate-manipulated town hall meetings and the 9/12 Washington demonstrations organized by tea baggers were genuine and reflected the mood of the country, which was anti big government. However, Max Blumenthal, a Nation contributor, interviewed some of the marchers. He discovered that they were ignorant of the issues and many didn’t know why they were there.

Zukerman, who has been very critical of Obama, turned up later on Lou Dobbs’ show on CNN to criticize Obama for his attempt to have the Olympic Games in Chicago. His black employee, Errol Louis of The Daily News , who survived the purge of black reporters that occurred when Zukerman took over, agreed with his boss. Amazingly, Lewis poses as a progressive on Air America affiliate WWRL 1600.