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

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.

Take the response to Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Media Matters wrote:

The volume emanating from the right quickly impacted more mainstream reporters. Time ’s Simon Robinson penned an online piece explaining how the award could prove politically harmful to the president, and Nancy Gibbs wrote a widely circulated article for Time as well, this one explaining why the Nobel was “the last thing [Obama] needs.” She’s right… we all know the Nobel Prize is something that should be avoided, you know, like cancer. Sigh.

It wasn’t long before the calls started for Obama to turn down the award, from a variety of sources. Malkin, CBS’ Chip Reid, Time’s Mark Halperin, John Bolton, Slate.com ’s Mickey Kaus, The Weekly Standard’s Mary Katherine Ham, and The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg all echoed the theme, among others.

Can Nigger Breakers be black? I would consider right-wing blacks, who continue to be brought on by cable producers who choose black and Hispanic panelists, those least likely to offend their white audience, solely to defame Obama during his campaign and during his presidency, to be Nigger Breakers, especially those from Rev. Moon’s newspaper, The Washington Times, and Barack Obama became a Nigger Breaker himself when he singled out black men in the United States and Africa for scolding.

He was admired for his placing race in the background. The exception was when he criticized Rev. Wright, black fathers, African leaders and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kanye West whom he called a jackass. He was applauded even by his critics for that one but when he said that the Boston police acted “stupidly” in the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., he was met with a national uproar and had to modify his remarks.

(When appearing before a conference of policemen, the officer who violated Gates’ rights and lied on his report about the arrest was greeted with a standing ovation. The entire Gates episode was a blow to those who adhere to the fantasy of a post-race United States.)

The purpose of the corporate media, which serve as a sort of home base for the Nigger Breaking operation against Obama, regardless of the opinions of Don Imus Alumni Howard Kurtz and others who pretend that Obama has the media in his pocket, seems to be that of positing a right-of-center United States, while the public that elected a president who campaigned as a liberal and the poll numbers, that shows continued support for the president, presents a left-of-center country. Yet on a Sunday’s This Week , a Republican operative Nicolle Wallace was unopposed when she talked about Obama’s declining poll numbers. His poll numbers had decreased as a result of network television broadcasting attention-grabbing antics of the tea baggers, but on the date of the actual broadcast of ABC’s This Week , his poll numbers had rebounded to fifty-six percent. During the fourth week in November, Gallup and Public Policy released polls that offered a break down of Obama’s poll numbers along racial lines. While Public Policy found his support among whites to have fallen to forty-two percent, he still maintained high numbers among Hispanics and blacks, sixty-seven percent among Hispanics and seventy-seven percent among blacks. Gallup found seventy-three percent support among non-whites, their term, ninety-one percent and seventy percent among Hispanics. The Hispanics and blacks whom the Jim Crow media bring on camera to diss Obama don’t reflect these numbers. (Richard Prince of the Maynard Institute writes: “According to Election Day exit polls, whites preferred McCain to Obama fifty-five percent to forty-three percent. In exit polls dating to 1972, Democrats have never carried a majority of the white vote.”) What the discussion left out was the media’s role in Obama’s declining numbers by exaggerating the strength of the far-right demonstrators and even assisting them. A Fox News reporter was spotted at the 9/12 demonstration egging on the demonstrators (some of whom, when interviewed by Max Blumenthal, didn’t seem to know why they had come to Washington in the first place.)

In October, Fox’s John Stossel actually appeared before audiences where he opposed what his sponsor, Americans for Prosperity, called a government insurance plan. The New York Times ’ Charles Blow wrote:

This was conservatives’ seething summer of discontent and unhinged hysteria: town halls, tea parties and tirades. They captured headlines and gained momentum. Misinformation ran amuck. President Obama’s approval ratings tumbled. Through it all, Obama maintained a Pollyannaish, laissez-faire disposition. Some found this worrisome. Others, like me, even thought it weak. But maybe not so fast.

According to Gallup poll results released on Wednesday, the president’s approval rating has stopped falling and has leveled out in the low-50 percents, about the same as Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s at this point in their presidencies (both two-termers, lest we forget).

An example of how the media have presented a few loud demonstrators to represent the thinking of the public occurred on October 13. After a conservative health bill passed a Senate committee, CNN’s Tom Foreman used footage of the same tea baggers rudely interrupting congresspersons to announce that the public was against the legislation. This was the theme of the cable shows and even Sunday talk shows that feign seriousness. On this issue and others the wealthy individuals who lurk behind the talk show screamers and who obey a gentleman’s agreement not to criticize each other, use their ownership of the airwaves to construct a false reality. They got us coming and going. Not only do they own the media, but finance the think tank “policy analysts” who are frequent guests on their shows. This is why Obama continues to be judged by all-white panels on CNN’s State of the Union , ABC’s This Week , C-Span’s The Washington Journal , which provides a service by exposing the abysmal ignorance of some Americans each day, Fox News Sunday , NBC’s Meet The Press and CBS’s Face The Nation . Given the dearth of those who share the background of those constituencies that voted overwhelmingly for Obama, blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and others, President Obama will continue to be judged by an all-white, mostly male, middle-aged jury, some of whom like Alex Castellanos, have designed racist campaigns and others like Mary Matalin who have shepherded scurrilous swift-boat styled propaganda campaigns against the president, and David Gregory, who defended Don Imus’s racist outbursts until the very end. On the morning of November 8, 2009, after the House passed a health bill that included a public option, after pundits of the left predicted that it wouldn’t up until the night before it passed, David Brooks, one of the most powerful of the country’s pundits, with a column in The New York Times , was brought on to Imus-defender David Gregory’s show, Meet The Press , to criticize the president on an all-white (one woman) panel. David Brooks is a neo-con who backed the invasion of Iraq, a multi-trillion-dollar calamity, yet complains about the president’s fiscal policies. He says his mentor is the late Irving Kristol and wrote that Bush won in 2004 because he carried states with high “white fertility rates” those who wanted to escape “vulgarity.”