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

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 23rd 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.”

Many 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.