The "liberal media" is one of the most enduring myths in political Americana. Despite all evidence to the contrary, which actually shows a mainstream media that constantly tilts right of center, conservatives have managed to say this disinformation enough times that some mistake it for truth. Taking an advantage of mock outrage from Bill O' Reilly and Glen Beck over a Law & Order SVU episode, Keith Olbermann manages to destroy the fabrication of the "liberal media" so utterly, we should never hear mention of it again.
Showing posts with label Media Watch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media Watch. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The "Liberal Media" & Other Mythical Beasts
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Angry, Right & White America
It was just eleven days ago that an anti-abortion militant with white supremacist ties gunned down reproductive rights doctor George Tiller in a Kansas church. Just this past April, three Pittsburgh police officers were killed by a teen who believed the government was going to take his guns away, and had frequented white nationalists sites like Stormfront. In the heat of the presidential campaign last June, a gunman walked into a Unitarian Church and opened fire, killing two parisoners during a children's play; the shooter would claim the church's liberal values drove him to violence. And since the election of the first African-American president, gun-sales have risen alongside the daily dosage of rhetoric from conservative right-wing media. So today, after a right-wing white supremacist walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and opened fire, killing an African-American security guard, why is anyone even remotely surprised?
More after the fold...
It feels like de ja vu, after just covering these themes in the Tiller death. But I find it necessary to again point out that it was just this past April that the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security released a memo warning of homegrown right-wing radical groups and their propensity for violence. Conservatives--both pundits and politicians--had a meltdown, claiming the government was outlawing opposing opinions and claiming they were being lumped in with racist hate groups. The American Legion soon jumped in, taking issue with the report's warnings of violent right-wing extremists recruiting disaffected one-time members of the armed forced. It was all utter nonsense of course, as the brief on domestic terrorism made no links to conservatism--the conservatives made that link themselves. And the concern of ex-military joining white supremacist groups is based on very recent facts, and in no way tarnishes all veterans. What should have been seen as a tempest in a teapot gained steam however as the media played in, allowing conservatives and right-wing ideologues--backed up by conservative leaning veterans groups--to cast themselves as victims of a liberal witch hunt. In days Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was making an apology for the "language" in the report.
But in the conservative and right-wing cries of foul over this memo, perhaps the lady doth protest too much.
While conservative pundits applaud and sensationalize FBI stings on terrorist fantasies of would-be "jihadists" (often suspiciously funded and aided by government informants), real-life acts of mayhem and murder by domestic right-wing terrorists go on right under our noses. Worse still, many of the most rabid conspiracy theories spouted by the likes of Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, serve as "intellectual" fodder for these gunmen. Yet no one in conservative television and radio noise machine is willing to take any responsibility or at the least tone down their rhetoric. In fact, they tend to lash out verbally at any insinuation places even a bit of blame on them. In the wake of George Tiller's death FOX host Bill O'Reilly, who had repeatedly called the doctor a "baby killer," claimed he himself in fact was a victim of the far-left.
Eric Boehlert at Media Matters is having none of it however:If Fox News is going to continue to traffic in hateful, vigilante-style rhetoric, then folks at Fox News, as well as their apologists in the GOP Noise Machine, are going to have to come up with better talking points to spin away the consequences of the right-wing madness they're so eager to incite....The Fox News crew is going to need better talking points because I fear the violence - the bouts of right-wing domestic terrorism - is likely to continue. As long as Fox News and the Noise Machine refuse to back off the incendiary language that they're actively mainstreaming, the political violence, visible just months into Obama's historic first term, may have only begun.
The reality is however that FOX News, while certainly wallowing in the cesspit of xenophobia, racism and intolerance to whip up the more fanatical of its base, did not invent any of this. They've certainly tapped into this angry sentiment and see it as a ratings bonanza, backing up faux-populist hate-rallies like the April "Tea Parties." Looks like Janane Garafalo was RIGHT.
But this type of racism and violence is unfortunately as American as apple pie and baseball, and follows a predictable pattern. When the economy falters and whites, usually disaffected angry males, feel under assault they find easy scapegoats they believe is behind their oppression. Fed along by media demagogues, a militarist gun-obsessed society, heroic vigilantism and an over-inflated patriarchal racial imaginings of their self-worth, they last out---often violently.
Back in 2006 during the emerging twilight of the Bush regime, retired veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces Stan Goff wrote of this as a hypernormal state of Americana, which he asserts is normally racist, right-leaning and patriarchal if only on an institutional level:These explicitly white supremacist groups, contrasted with the implicitly white supremacist Republican Party, for example, openly embrace a vision of fascism, and openly admire fascist leaders....We need to first see for how long white supremacy has been considered ab-normal in the United States; then we can see how ab-normal it is right now....What is seldom examined in public discourse outside the universities and a handful of anti-racist political formations, is the question of what it means to be “white.” Thinkers from Toni Morrison to Noel Ignatiev to bell hooks to Theodore Allen to Mab Segrest to David Roediger have studied whiteness extensively, in its economic, cultural and political dimensions, and conclude unanimously that there is no “objective” measure for what it means; but that it is a social construction linked absolutely to social power. The insistence on existence of a white race, by racists and non-racists alike, is symptomatic of a form of mystification that conceals the concrete relations of power behind a set of widely accepted abstractions. White supremacy as a beliefhas evolved out of the practice of people in power, who defined themselves as white as a way of differentiating themselves from those over whom they wielded that power. Some very well-known American presidents who made openly white supremacist pronouncements were Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Of course, until the dismantling of Jim Crow in the South, white supremacy was a norm, and before the Civil War, slavery was a norm. White supremacy was so normal in 1964 that after the defeat of Goldwater, the Republican Party adopted thinly veiled racist appeals to attract white voters who felt betrayed by the reluctant Democratic Party support for civil rights legislation. Openly racist public officials like Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott, even after their affiliations with white supremacist organizations were publicized, continued to be elected. The Republican appeals to white supremacy were cloaked as opposition to welfare, as “states rights,” and as concern about “crime.” As late as 1999 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives blocked a vote to condemn the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization with whom then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had close ties. How normed does something have to be before we can say it is normal?
And this brings us to a problem with the media, and in part even this blog. The coverage of these specific acts of violence, or even the focus on the hate spewed by FOX News acolytes and others, perhaps obscures a larger more unsettling truth that speaks to the pervasive nature of racism and whiteness in this country. We usually paint these individuals as lone bizarre gunmen driven by senseless hate---bad apples in our otherwise rational and tolerant "post-racial" society. The larger problem however is that there are throngs of these disaffected Americans--mostly white males--prone to believe conspiracy theories that blame Jews, immigrants, blacks and others for their plight. They don't fall out of the sky or come from some strange and mysterious place. They are borne and raised right here, in a society that seems to easily create such individuals and provide them the proper atmosphere for their hatred, xenophobia and violent tendencies to flourish. Tackling that "hard truth" may provide us some greater insight, that is if we dare.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Conservatives, the Radical Right and White Extremism
Last week an anti-choice militant named Scott Roeder walked into a Kansas church and gunned down reproductive doctor George Tiller. Roeder is part of a growing extremist segment of the American populace, often fed by right-wing media ideologues like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck who while not outright calling for violence create an atmosphere of hate and paranoia. So it should come as little surprise that Scott Roeder in fact once belonged a white nationalist organization that preached the inferiority of other races, anti-Semitism and other Aryan-based fantasies.
When the Obama administration's Department of Homeland Security released a memo in April warning of homegrown right-wing radical groups, conservatives cried foul--insisting they were being unfairly lumped together with racist hate groups. This was nonsense of course, as the brief on domestic terrorism made no mention of conservatism in their warnings of right-wing extremists. But perhaps, there is more to this connection than many of us are willing to admit.
A brief article by Mother Jones traces the ideological connections that took Scott Roeder from white supremacy to religious fundamentalist militant and terrorist.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Rush & Newt Are Winning?
Rush and Newt are winning? When I first read that title by E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, I was puzzled. Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich winning? If anything their over-the-top antics have mostly backfired. In their attempts to paint President Barack Obama as a socialist, un-American and the dangerous "black other," they have mostly managed to alienate themselves and their party. Obama's approval rating remains high and most seem pleased, or at least comfortable, with his overall performance. So I wasn't certain what Dionne could have meant. If anything, Rush and Newt appear to be losing. But after reading his article, I was left wondering if perhaps Dionne didn't have a good point.
Read more below...
Since the beginning of his presidency, we have been held hostage to acts of reckless stupidity from the GOP and its surrogates. From FOX News to Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing noise machine has been consistent with its outlandish reactionary attacks. In the face of this the GOP has been either silent or subservient, turning themselves into willing accomplices.
E.J. Dionne writes:The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court (though Gingrich retreated from the word yesterday), wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, recently went so far as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.
The charges and accusations have been so absurd, so beyond the pale, that conservative politics and criticism has seemingly degenerated into a freak show. The problem is that where there are freaks, you can be certain our national media will follow.
Always one for sensationalism rather than substance, each and every charge hurled by the reactionary right-wing makes it into the corporate media cycle. That these criticisms are usually ludicrous and often wholly baseless doesn't seem to matter. Rush Limbaugh could claim Obama had three heads--rest assured mainstream media would trumpet his claim and have on talking heads to debate the number of heads the President has, and how this affects beltway politics.
Entertaining these claims not only reduces serious journalism to the level of the National Enquirer, as Dionne points out it stifles and obscures real substantive discussion regarding the Obama administration's policy decisions. Namely he points out that while the media is fixated on the freak show, and in turn forces Americans to gawk at the bizarre GOP circus, they ignore criticisms such as those leveled by progressives at a recent gathering: While the right wing's rants get wall-to-wall airtime, you almost never hear from the sort of progressive members of Congress who were on an America's Future panel on Tuesday. Reps. Jared Polis of Colorado, Donna Edwards of Maryland and Raul Grijalva of Arizona....why are their voices muffled when they raise legitimate concerns, while Limbaugh's rants get amplified? Isn't Afghanistan a more important issue to debate than a single comment by Judge Sonia Sotomayor about the relative wisdom of Latinas?
There is also more at work here. By narrowing the discussion over President Obama's policies to fanatical critics like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, media outlets are giving Americans a false choice--either side with the moderate, liberal-leaning but centrist White House administration, or join the shouting chorus at the freak show. The voices of those in the progressive camp, who offer both praise and criticism of policies that range from the escalation of the Afghan war to health care, are left mute. Ironically this benefits no one more than the Obama administration, who can make their moderate centrism look progressive--especially when even the slightest move to the left is met with screams of socialism. No wonder many Democratic strategists welcome the GOP freakouts. Perhaps it's about time all of us--from the corporate media machine to the Democratic establishment to everyday progressives--stopped giving so much airtime, blog time and print space to the circus performers of the right-wing, and realize there are more legitimate voices that have yet to be heard.
E.J. Dionne's full article here.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
A Danger to the Republic ?
Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about "progressive fascism" - and muse about armed insurrection - or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the "most polarizing President ever," it is hard to escape the conclusion that today's U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.
No kidding! So writes Robert Parry at Consortium News, recounting the absolutely dismal nature of current corporate media. As if the cheerleaders on FOX openly calling for rebellion over ridiculous faux populist claims wasn't bad enough, along with GOP politicians who fan those flames, the allegedly more "moderate" media networks continuously parrot this rumor mill. Over at CNN and MSNBC, figures like Lou Dobbs and Joe Scarborough use their platforms to first smear President Obama, and then (in a move of sheer audacity) claim he's "polarizing." Most perplexing, these fearmongers claim they are the victims--invoking charges of "McCarthyism" with the straight face of a Klan member claiming to be a victim of reverse racism. Valid criticism is one thing; and it's welcomed of any political figure. But the vitrol being whipped up by FOX News and pundits on other media channels does little more than expose what blogger Jill Tubman rightly calls, "the rotting racist underbelly" of white angry conservatism. With all this media-driven hate, it's little wonder that two high-profile mass shootings in a year have been linked to angry white males out to kill liberals, or who feared losing their precious guns under some Obama "dictatorship." The question remains, why, even with a Democrat in the White House, and a Democratic Congress, does the American corporate media still feel a need to give a soapbox for the farmost fringes of the right? And does the Left truly take these provocateurs as seriously as we should?
Robert Parry's article after the fold...
US News Media Fails America, Again
By Robert Parry
April 13, 2009
Watching Glenn Beck of Fox News rant about “progressive fascism” – and muse about armed insurrection – or listening to mainstream pundits prattle on about Barack Obama as the “most polarizing President ever,” it is hard to escape the conclusion that today’s U.S. news media represents a danger to the Republic.
By and large, the Washington press corps continues to function within a paradigm set in the 1980s, mostly bending to the American Right, especially to its perceived power to destroy mainstream journalistic careers and to grease the way toward lucrative jobs for those who play ball.
The parameters set by this intimidated (or bought-off) news media, in turn, influence how far Washington politicians feel they can go on issues, like health-care reform or environmental initiatives, or how risky they believe it might be to pull back from George W. Bush’s “war on terror” policies.
Democratic hesitancy on these matters then enflames the Left, which expresses its outrage through its own small media, reprising the old theme that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between Democrats and Republicans – a reaction that further weakens chances for any meaningful reform.
This vicious cycle has repeated itself again and again since the Reagan era, when the Right built up its intimidating media apparatus – a vertically integrated machine which now reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to radio, TV and the Internet. The Right accompanied its media apparatus with attack groups to go after troublesome mainstream journalists.
Meanwhile, the American Left never took media seriously, putting what money it had mostly into “organizing” or into direct humanitarian giving. Underscoring the Left’s fecklessness about media, progressives have concentrated their relatively few media outlets in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away – and three hours behind – the news centers of Washington and New York.
By contrast, the Right grasped the importance of “information warfare” in a modern media age and targeted its heaviest firepower on the frontlines of that war – mostly the political battlefields of Washington – thus magnifying the influence of right-wing ideas on policymakers.
One consequence of this media imbalance is that Republicans feel they can pretty much say whatever they want – no matter how provocative or even crazy – while Democrats must be far more circumspect, knowing that any comment might be twisted into an effective attack point against them.
full article here.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Covering Up the Past
In 1935 author Sinclair Lewis published It Can't Happen Here, a satirical novel that details the struggles of a lone reporter against fascist US regime that had come to power. Sinclair's novel, while verging on science fiction, was a warning that an oppressive government could sweep into power anywhere, if citizens and a watchful media were not vigilant. Recounting the last eight years under George Bush and the extent to which that administration sought to consolidating and abusing power, one is left to ponder just how close to Sinclair's alternate reality we may have all found ourselves.
Yet, despite all warning signs, our mainstream media culture ignored or downplayed the threat. And even now that the past regime is out of office, many seem reluctant to revisit the past. What's more, seeming numb in the face of power, most seem to have accepted the Obama administration's and Democratic leadership's timid approach to investigations.
The Democratic and Executive reasons for reluctance are clearly obvious, even if not always agreed with, and often stated. As journalist and media activist Eric Alterman points out, "Obama's calculation is clear: investigations would threaten the aura of bipartisanship he seeks in order to pass his ambitious agenda."
But exactly how does this stop the US media establishment from doing its job? Why is big media reluctant to go back and do its own investigation on possible past violations of our rights and liberties? Alterman may have hit the answer on the proverbial head: But in the case of the mainstream media, the motivation is simply the mindset: admit the dangers posed to our democracy by the Bush administration, and you're admitting that democracy's watchdog was sleeping (or cowering) just when he, and she, were most needed.
Could it be that our media establishment, fearful of its own silent complicity, willful negligence or even propagandizing, now wants to ignore the past--in the hopes that we all forget their role? If so, that's a tragic statement on the status of journalism, whose job it should be to print any past misdeeds into history if only to make certain we have a record--and perhaps ensure that it doesn't happen again. To not do so, and not shoulder their own responsibility, says perhaps that even after those last eight years they managed to learn nothing.
Read Alterman's full article here.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Tragic Failure of American Journalism in Gaza
Look at the news in the world, and in the past weeks you would have watched as the Israeli military machine destroyed Gaza, UN buildings and even an American school, using controversial weapons that have left thousands of civilians dead and injured. Catch the news in the US however, from broadcast television to newspapers, and you would think you live in some other world--where Israeli military and government propaganda serves as the script for a necessary and "defensive" war.
That US politicians are unable (through cowardice or tunnel-vision) to critique Israel, is nothing new. Neither is it news that our media find objectivity a lacking trait when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, with the sheer scale of what happened in the past few weeks, it is still shocking to see this willful blindess and group-think in action.
Below is an article by journalist Chris Hedges, examining this sad state of affairs:
With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again
By Chris Hedges
Jan. 26, 2009
The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel’s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.
Full article here or after the fold.
All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.
We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention Israel’s “security needs,” include statements by Israeli officials who insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and of course note Israel’s right to defend itself. We do this throughout the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our occupation, but remind everyone that “Saddam killed his own people.” We write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike but never forget to mention that the Taliban “oppresses women.” Their crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we never forget to mention the “war on terror.” We ask how and who but never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as another, we are part of the problem, not the solution.
“Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,” New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment of the paper’s coverage, going on to conclude “though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job—and has largely succeeded.”
The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks—that bombs and rockets were “flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza”—was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth. It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about “proportionality,” not legality. Israel was in open violation of international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world’s fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.
The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians’ desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO intervention to halt it.
It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N. agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli government had made a “central error” during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing “to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip. … [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,” Zakai said, “it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. … You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.”
Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration. Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.
Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel “could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.”
There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S. press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center’s efforts to prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors largely accepted without any real protest Israel’s ban on coverage and allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel’s violations of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.
“The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,” he said.
Israel’s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or bombed, was not used directly against civilians.
Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions, warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas’ corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas, once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its agreement with Israel. Hamas’ willingness to negotiate with Israel, albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas leadership as collaborators.
Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June 2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted, often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may be too late.
The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.”
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The Möbius Strip Issue
Möbius Strip: a surface with only one side and only one boundary component.
In our one-sided political and media culture, it's hard to get an objective side to any dealings between Israel and the Palestinians--much less the Palestinian side. Whether Republican or Democrat, liberal-leaning or conservative, politicians and pundits have come out in force for Israel's attack on Gaza, co-signing onto a policy that has left hundreds dead while hiding behind a pretense of self-defense. It is a shameful hypocrisy that is so blatantly obvious, one has to believe we are watching theatre instead of reality--because no one can possibly be that obtuse. As often of late in these times, the sane voice has come not from journalists or those we elect to office, but from a biting, humorous, half-hour satire known as The Daily Show.
In what some have called "brilliant" or "brave" and downright "ballsy," host Jon Stewart manages to raise valid questions not only on current Israeli policy, but calls to task a media and political class that reduces a complex topic into "the Möbius Strip of Issues."
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
S M E A R C A S T I N G
Today the good people at FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) released an expose on the spread of Islamophobia in the news media. Aptly defined as "Smearcasting," the report profiles 12 of the leading pundits and media figures who engage in bigotry, fear-mongering and misinformation in order to gin up anti-Muslim sentiment amongst their viewers and listenership. Among the most flagrant offenders are FOX News talk show hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, talk radio's Michael Savage, CNN's Glenn Beck, along with right-wing activists Michelle Malkin, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz.
As noted in a press release by the media watchdog group, the document "describes a loose network of right-wing, anti-Muslim partisans who regularly use innuendo, questionable sources of information and even lies to smear, and effectively marginalize, Muslim Americans in the media."
The full reprt can be downloaded in a PDF form here.
Excerpts from the press release are highlighted below:This report takes a fresh look at Islamophobia and its perpetrators in today's media. We found prominent right-wing pundits and activists using misinformation and innuendo to broadcast hate against an entire community -- in this case, Muslims -- and major media have either fallen asleep at the wheel or, in many cases, have actively helped to spread the smears.--Steve Rendall, senior analyst at FAIR.
These Muslim-bashing attacks have a real impact, not only on Muslims in America but on our civil discourse. We're in the middle of a historic election in which Islamophobia has already played a role, and I don't think we've seen the last of the dirty tricks and the smearcasting. Media need to step up and do their job of separating fact from innuendo, and they should distinguish the impartial experts from the smearcasters.--Steve Rendall, senior analyst at FAIR.
The report features case studies of the impact of smearcasting including:Right-wing pundit Daniel Pipes led a successful campaign to oust the principal of a secular Arabic-language New York City public school by initiating a media-driven pressure campaign. The principal's history of forging inter-faith and inter-ethnic alliances was ignored as the campaign branded her a "stealth Islamist," and media pressure eventually forced her to resign.
Conservative columnist and Internet activist Michelle Malkin pressured Dunkin' Donuts into dropping an ad featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray wearing a black-and-white scarf -- which Malkin falsely identified as a keffiyeh, calling it a symbol of "murderous Palestinian jihad."
To download a copy of the report visit:
http://www.smearcasting.com/pdf/FAIR_Smearcasting_Final.pdf
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Bush Gets Suuuuurrrved! ... In Europe
BOULTON: I mean, you've talked a lot about freedom. I've heard you talk about freedom -- I think every time I've seen you.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
BOULTON: And yet there are those who would say, look, let's take Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and rendition and all those things, and to them that is the, you know, the complete opposite of freedom.
Ooh snap!
Our bought and paid for corporate media is finally standing up to President Bush and asking him tough questions, even when he’s just giving a softball interview with his wife! Wow! Can you believe it? Well it's about time that—-
Oh, wait a minute, my bad…this interview happened in *London* and the journalist is British.
So basically, the foreign press does a better job holding US politicians responsible than our own.
Pathetic.
Read more from excerpt and peep the link provided for full interview. Those of you in the mainstream media--take notes.
Excerpt:
BOULTON: I mean, you've talked a lot about freedom. I've heard you talk about freedom -- I think every time I've seen you.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
BOULTON: And yet there are those who would say, look, let's take Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and rendition and all those things, and to them that is the, you know, the complete opposite of freedom.
THE PRESIDENT: Of course if you want to slander America, you can look at it one way. But you go down -- what you need to do -- I think I suggested you do this at a press conference -- if you go down to Guantanamo and take a look at how these prisoners are treated -- and they're working it through our court systems. We are a land of law.
BOULTON: But the Supreme Court have just said that -- you know, ruled against what you've been doing down there.
THE PRESIDENT: But the district court didn't. And the appellate court didn't.
BOULTON: The Supreme Court is supreme, isn't it?
THE PRESIDENT: It is, and I accept their verdict. I don't agree with their verdict. And it's not what I was doing down there. This was a law passed by our United States Congress that I worked with the Congress to get passed and sign into law.
BOULTON: But it looked like an attempt to bypass the Constitution, to a certain extent.
THE PRESIDENT: This was a law passed, Adam. We passed a law. Bypassing the Constitution means that we did something outside the bounds of the Constitution. We went to the Congress and got a piece of legislation passed.
BOULTON: Which is now being struck down, I think.
THE PRESIDENT: It is, and I accept what the Supreme Court did, and I necessarily don't have to agree with it.
Full interview:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,91211-1319126,00.html
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Right-Wing Shill Gets Surrrved!
While I missed alot of posts in May, this one I most regret...
Someone call Hell and check the temp. Because today I have to give Chris Matthews--he of MSNBC Hardball who usually annoys me to no end with his ceaseless prattling about *nothing*--his just deserved props. As one of my least favorite media pundits, Matthews admittedly became my hero for about *a few minutes* as he completely eviscerates right wing radio talking head Kevin James who in his screaming about Obama, appeasement and Hitler, doesn't even know who Neville Chamberlain is. Keep in mind, this headcase used to be a federal prosecutor!
There's nothing down here! What you looking for? Go back up there and watch that ass-whoopin' again!
Saturday, April 12, 2008
How the Media Keeps Us *Dumb*
Though for the sake of time and brevity I no longer do the weekly "media watch," it's still good to keep in mind how our corporate mainstream media keeps the public woefully uninformed. As Glen Greenwald over at Salon.com notes:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits.
So if that's the case, with such important topics to pursue, why is it the major corp news media found more time to talk about the sexual indiscretions of a former US president and question the patriotism and bowling skills of a current presidential candidate?
According to NEXIS, over the past thirty days the following topics were mentioned within a given frequency, obviously ranking their order of importance to the corporate media pundits:
"Yoo and torture" - 102 times
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73 times
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16 times
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043 times
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 times (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607 times
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079 times
Media Matters has also documented much of this seeming race to the bottom when it comes to news worthy of being called journalism.
According to Eric Boehlert even the Iraq War has taken a back seat to any titillating story able to fill newspaper space and airtime. While "news consumers' interest in Iraq remains relatively high," he states, "news coverage has basically vanished." He notes:
According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Coverage Index, reports about the situation in Iraq accounted for just 2 percent of total news coverage from January through March.
On the April 11th episode of Hardball, host Chris Matthews and correspondent David Shuster, as if seeking to crystallize the media's propensity for the inane, spent what seemed to be an endless amount of time actually evaluating Sen. Barack Obama's beverage selection at a local diner, as some barometer of his electability:
MATTHEWS: What's so hard about doing a diner? I don't get it. Why doesn't he go in there and say, "Did you see the papers today? What do you think about that team? How did we do last night?" Just some regular connection?
SHUSTER: Well, here's the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, "I'll have orange juice."
MATTHEWS: No.
SHUSTER: He did.
And it's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, "Here, have some coffee," you say, "Yes, thank you," and, "Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?" You don't just say, "No, I'll take orange juice," and then turn away and start shaking hands. That's what happens [unintelligible] --
MATTHEWS: You don't ask for a substitute on the menu.
SHUSTER: Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. With indepth media coverage like this, who needs propaganda? Keeping us all dumb will do the trick just fine.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Randi Rhodes Kisses Air America G'Bye
So it finally happened. Air America host Randi Rhodes has quit the liberal radio station. This bombshell happened a week after Rhodes was suspended for calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro "f*cking whores" during a stand up comedy routine in San Francisco. Air America Media released a statement Thursday saying Rhodes informed them Wednesday night that she was severing ties with the network and going over to their key competitor--Nova M Radio. My thoughts...
When Air America Radio first began in March of 2004, it was a welcome bit of relief from the right-wing dogma that dominated the mainstream airwaves. The SNL veteran Al Franken was a big draw, as were morning shows featuring stand up comedian Mark Maron. Even pop culture figures like Chuck D and Janeane Garafalo had their own shows. Then there was Randi Rhodes, who was in a class all by herself. In the past few years the station has seen a few shifts in management, and the loss of more than a few hosts. By the time the most recent owner, Mark Green, stepped onto the scene, alot of things had changed.
Al Franken, left to run a senate campaign. Mark Maron and his popular morning show was canned. Mike Malloy--the most radical leftist on the station--was canned, and was picked up by the Phoenix based Nova M Radio. Janene Garafalo ended up leaving because she couldn't deal with the management, which she saw as stifling. Sam Seder, her co-star and quite popular, ended up being bounced from a daily show to a Sunday only time slot. His show was replaced with this guy named Lionel (a move AA listeners seemed to detest en masse) upon the most recent management shift. And now the person who was undoubtedly one of the biggest draws for AA has left for Nova M.
Hmmm. Not the best of signs.
As a person who subscribes to AA (for now) and podcasts Randi Rhodes, my relationship with her show has always been love/hate. Randi pulls no punches. She says what she wants and what she believes, even when I may think it seems quite wrong. She's intense, arrogant, is prone to yell her points and is not above treating even her admiring fans with condescension. Her on air onslaught of Ralph Nader on her first show was, imho, rude to the point of uncalled for. On more than one occassion I've turned her off or tuned her out for a week or so, because her abrasive style gets to me. And sometimes there was more commentary on her personal life than politics, and I really had little interest with what she and her friend Wendy Williams--yes, the black radio gossip diva--talked about while sipping mojitos.
That being said, Randi has the rare talent of being able to deliver a verbal ass whooping to Rush Limbaugh, Hannity and the whole right wing crew with seeming ease. Conservatives who called into her show with their marching orders and talking points were *handled* the way you want to see em' handled. Randi probably helped publicize books like Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" more than anyone I know--except perhaps Amy Goodman. During Katrina, she was the *only* media personality I heard (a white woman at that) who asserted that the wild rumors of mass rape, mayhem and "birth of a nation" phobia that dominated the news narrative was bullsh*t---for which she was derided, but eventually vindicated. And she has vocally and strongly opposed the Iraq War and the Bush regime in general since day ONE.
Odd thing is, Randi used to chastise anyone--to the point of yelling--who tried to bash one Democratic presidential candidate over another. Because she said her friend Bill Clinton had told her, "fall in love during the primaries--but fall in line for the election." She'd point out that no matter who it was you wanted to win the primary, when it came to a Dem vs the GOP in the national election, u voted for the Dem because the GOP was a nightmare of an alternative. Then during the TX/Ohio primaries, something in Randi began to shift. I think it was the same sense of disgust everyone had with the 3AM phone call ads, the seeming race-baiting, etc. By the time all was said and done, Randi Rhodes, who had defended the Clintons for near two decades, did a 180.
She never came out and said she voted for Obama previously. But she basically pointed out that due to the math, Hillary could not win. And therefore her staying in the campaign was a selfish act that would only result in the destruction of the Democratic Party, and possibly allow the GOP to win come Nov. She began to see the Clintons as downright dangerous and subversive, and claimed she would no longer hold back on revealing all the dirt she knew about them. It was like Malcolm after he found out about Elijah's "marital indescretions." When Clinton threw a kitchen sink at Obama, Randi threw two or three back, encouraging her audience to go out immediatley and work to ensure Obama's victory. Her common mantra as opposed to "fall in love in the primary" became, "you can't marry that woman!" When it came to the Clintons, Randi had become Air America's Jeremiah Wright.
Alot of her fans who were Clinton supporters didn't take kindly to this, and called her out repeatedly. Randi "handled" them as well as she did the conservatives. As I listened to all of this, a part of me enjoyed it...for a while. Then it began to get really vitrolic. I'm no Clinton fan, but some of Randi's comments made *me* wince. So when I first heard about the "f*ckin whore" statement she made with regards to Clinton during a comedy sketch, I wasn't so surprised.
I personally think that was overboard. There are alot of ways to be critical of Clinton and her surrogates without going in that direction. As a person whose pegged as an Obama supporter, I don't really think that helps her (or Obama's) cause. On the other hand, she didn't make these comments on-air. She made them during a comedy stand up routine, that AA claims they were in part supporting. The free speech area here gets really murky, as it brings up issues of censorship and how much any company can intrude into one's life outside of one's primary job. Yet I can understand AAs case, even if I don't know if suspension--which eventually led to Randi to quit--was the best course of action.
Oh well, NOVA M radio I'm sure is gleeful at this catch. As for the future of Air America Radio, I'm not too sure...
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Iraq & The Media- The Sixth Year
The five year anniversary of the war in Iraq went by last week. Media highlights included speaking to military figures, politicians and others as they recounted incidents of battle and occupation. What was sorely lacking from most coverage however was the blatant complicity of the media itself. With the exception of investigative journalists like PBS Bill Moyers Buying the War, the media has done little in accounting its own role in the lead up to war--which unfortunately is not as uncommmon as we'd like to think. So it wasn't surprising that when confronted with a bit of truth about Iraq, that does not follow the laid out narrative that both the US government and the media has agreed upon, some news pundits aren't certain how to react. Such was the case on a recent episode of Charlie Rose, where two Iraqi nationals (now living in the US, a journalist and a professor) voiced their opposition to the US invasion and occupation of their country, and recounted the great suffering that had taken place because of it, much to the surprise of their seemingly combative (and disbelieving) host.
Investigative journalist and media critic Glenn Greenwald posted excerpts of the surprisingly frank interview on Salon.com in the article What Can and Cannot Be Spoken on Television. The Iraqis interviewed not only speak out against the Iraqi Occupation, but the entire US history in the region--from its prior support of dictator Saddam Hussein to the Gulf War to the disastrous sanctions era. Rose, who has a constant need to talk over his guests, attempting to correct or translate their words, seems to try to push the conversation where he wishes it would go, and comes off as America's apologist.
ROSE: And obviously, what we want to accomplish on this fifth anniversary of the American invasion, or the coalition invasion of Iraq, is how they see it as Iraqis, five years later.
When asked for an assessment by Charlie Rose:
ALI FADHIL: That's a big question, assessment. Well, basically, probably, I`ll kind of sum it in a few words.
It's -- we have a country where the government is not functioning after five years. We have too many internal problems. And we have the violence increasing day after day.
We have a huge crisis of refugees inside and outside Iraq. We have a total failure of the -- of the civilian -- the civilian structure and what's happening inside. We have the sectarian divisions increasing. We didn't have that before. Now we have it.
So, basically, my assessment is we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it's wiped out.
CHARLIE ROSE: And Iraq is worse off because the United States came?
ALI FADHIL: It's worse off because the United States came to Iraq, definitely, and because the United States did all these mistakes in Iraq.
And:
CHARLIE ROSE: So where do we go from here? Five years after the invasion of Iraq, what is a wise American policy?
ALI FADHIL: Let me start with telling you what is happening right now, what is the American policy right now in Iraq.
It's so shame to say that America is in Iraq right now, and particularly the State Department and also the Pentagon as well, the U.S. Army in Iraq. They're going back to Saddam's policies in everything. . . . If you, you know, name it, name the most successful project of the surge -- outcome of the surge, the (INAUDIBLE) councils. You know, these insurgents, the Sunnis, even Shiites.
CHARLIE ROSE: The so-called awakening.
ALI FADHIL: Awakening council, exactly. They're giving them money to protect their own neighborhoods. Isn't that the same what happened under Saddam? . . .
Anything [Americans] do -- probably even in good intentions -- is bad for us, everything they do, everything. There's nothing they're doing is right.
And that's what is going to happen. It's just prolonging the diaspora of the Iraqis. We're suffering more and more every day. We need, you know, to start the salvation (ph). . .
SINAN ANTOON: The president today said something really obscene to my mind. He said Iraq is witnessing the first Arab uprising against al Qaeda.
We did not have al Qaeda in Iraq before.We had a ruthless dictatorship.
You can read more excerpts of the interview here:
Excerpts of interview with Sinan Antoon and Ali Fadhil
Also view that interview here:
Video Excerpt from Charlie Rose
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Black Thoughts on Jeremiah Wright & the Audacity of Whiteness
One Email Forum Reacts to the Furor Over Pastor Jeremiah Wright
"...there is a tradition in the black church for pastors to use colorful analogy and hyperbole when giving sermons. But that only works when folks are being logical, and we all know logic flys out the window when we think about white people and their perception of us. This can kill him, [Obama] if not against Hillary, in the general election. This is race-baiting, and it's going to work."--KK, member of a black email group reacting to the breaking news of the Pastor Jeremiah Wright video.
It has been over a week now that videos of Pastor Jeremiah Wright began circulating around the internet like a virus, finding its way onto national media outlets and setting off one of the biggest firestorms of what has been billed as an historic presidential campaign season. The grainy images of the popular black minister, one-time mentor topresidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, shows him railing against the racial injustice of America--and pulling no punches.
In assessing the rise of Barack Obama against opponent Hillary Clinton, Wright said his former mentee "knows what it means living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people — Hillary would never know that, Hillary ain't never been called a n@gger."
In a speech given after 2001, Wright is seen recounting US foreign and domestic policy blunders as a pretext to 9/11. "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."
In another sermon that quickly became the most widely quoted, Wright says the US government wants blacks "to sing God Bless America" despite enduring years of continued abuse and oppression. "No, no, no," declares Wright forcefully, "God damn America!"
After a weekend of making the rounds on talk shows to explain and denounce the words of the man who married him and baptised his children, Sen. Barack Obama gave a much anicipated speech to address the issue. As before, Obama stated that he equivocally denounced his pastor for "views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
Yet at the same time, he refused to disown his pastor, and seemed to be giving America--white America anyway--a brief history of black existence in this country. Obama pointed out that the Constitution "was stained by... [America's]...original sin of slavery." He went on in stark terms to recount issues of legalized discrimination, Jim Crow, disfranchisement, racial wealth inequality and more that have frustrated and restricted black existence. "For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years," he said. "That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table."
Media reaction to the speech varied. Mainstream outlets generally praised it as a good speech. Political pundits gave it high marks, especially for Obama's bravery to "elevate the discussion" about race. Yet most wondered if it would hit home with much of white America, particularly rural whites in places like Pennsylvania. Conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, in typical fashion, denounced the speech and has since gone on a full on Obama-smear campaign. FOX's Sean Hannity--in similar form--went as far as to call Obama a racist and an anti-Semite, though for reasons not at all clear. Recent polls have shown that the entire racially charged event has diminished Obama's lead over Clinton, but not nearly as bad as many predicted. The question remains, was his speech enough? Did it soothe white fears? Can he recover from the fallout and backlash?
Much like Pastor Wright's commentary was tucked away from whites--who at times seem blissfully unaware of the goings-on in black America--so has much of black reaction to the entire furor been missed. While television news broadcasts tend to feature black news pundits who must choose their words carefully and never stray too far from the accepted narrative, a flurry of activity on the topic in the black virtual community offers a wider insight. On message boards, blogs and within black-created email groups, articles and editorials are passed back and forth as the issue of Wright, Obama and America--particularly white America--are discussed and debated.
The following account follows the writings on one black email forum. Made up of about at most 18 or more members, they hail from careers as varied as computer engineering to public school administration. Some come from higher learning, others from the corporate business world. They are from different regions of the US, with some tracing recent ancestry from across the black Diaspora. They are single or married, in both intra and inter racial relationships, of varied religious perspectives and sharing differing politics. Most do not know each other personally outside the virtual community, and there is usually as much heated debate between them as their is agreement. There is no distinct purpose for the forum, other than to talk, vent, share stories, jokes or news articles. Topics can range from politics to science fiction to Hip Hop to child rearing. Many were notinitial supporters of Sen. Barack Obama, with some previously backing Sen. John Edwards, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Sen. Hillary Clinton or no candidate at all. Most have never voiced any party affiliation, and more than a few might probably call themselves Independents. As an interesting cross-section, they shed insight into some of the discussions in the black community over the past week.
*In disclosure, the architect of this blog space is a member of the email group and his posts are included within
For many blacks who paid attention to politics, such as those on the forum, at first sighting of the Pastor Wright video, there was a sense of brewing trouble.
"This is huge," KK warned the forum as the story broke. "Because if I know anything aboutwhite people, I know they cannot digest the pastor's message without fear...When I watched the Good Morning America show, I felt something in my chest hurting. Not so much because I support Obama , but, because I knew this is the kind of smear, this is an attack on being black and having a conscious black perspective on America. This is the kind of divisive attack that is going to create a greater divide between white people and black people."
Fellow member VJ agreed, expressing a growing sense of frustration over what she saw as censorship of black emotions and political perspectives.
"It's sad that in this day and age, we continue to be the only group that is not ALLOWED to speak of our experiences in the sense that critically analyzes the power dynamics that continue to oppress us," she noted. "We know Obama is running for President but somehow, because he is, we all are not allowed to mention the conditions that leave us disempowered. Wright's message that Obama is not white is true. Obama is not rich is true. And Obama is not privileged is true. Isn't that what drew a lot of folks to him in the first place?"
For many on the forum, the issue itself was not so much about Wright or Obama, but rather what was seen as the hypocritical media news lens through which the story was being viewed. Online articles like that of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) showing media bias in the treatment of controversial religious figures aligned with GOP hopeful Sen. John McCain, like the Christian Zionist Rev. JohnHagee , made their way to the forum as evidence. The title of one popular black news blog was noted approvingly for its cynicism about sensationalist race-baiting journalism: "Media’s New Attacks: Focus on Obama Pastor, FAUX News Leads the Charge."
Not all media coverage however was condemned. Articles and news stories that seemed
to show more objective coverage like a Newsweek piece on Pastor Wright's Trinity Church, was given the benefit of the doubt with only a few criticisms. More typical however for the forum were articles and comments fromprogressive news sites and blogs that equally lambasted the negative media coverage. The Nation magazine's Christopher Haye's piece "Obama, Politics and the Pulpit," that decried the hypocritical "media staged collective freakout" over Pastor Wright hit the forum to praises of "Amen!"
Anger was not levelled only at the news media and the white mainstream, but what some saw as inaction on the part of black leaders, activists and the general community, towards the continued smearing campaign of Pastor Wright.
"I’m extremely disappointed that Black Leadership around the country has allowed the media to smear this brother without uttering a word in his defense," lamented SB as he forwarded an article from The New York Times. "Have we become so brainwashed, afraid for our jobs, or comfortable that we have forgotten where we come from? Does hearing the truth bring back too many painful memories because we believe we have risen above all of that? ...if I had been in Brother Wright’s congregation listening to those sermons, I would have been giving him a standing ovation too! We all know that Sen. Obama is being forced to condemn a man that he loves and respects. And if he could do so without torpedoing his campaign, he would tell America the truth. I’m sorry America is shocked by Rev. Wright’s words but if the shoe fits...?"
To that end, there was a great deal of wrestling over what many knew Senator Barack Obama would have to do, and what he should do. While there seemed to be an understanding that some denouncing would have to be made, for political expediency, there seemed to also be a countering notion that Pastor Wright should not be hung out to dry for expressing thoughts to which so much of black America could relate.
"To his credit, the new pastor of Wrights church did not back down nor apologize," AF pointed out in an email. "I also saw this brother on a FOX channel on a Hanna and something program that was also defending Wright... But if you listen carefully,Obama did not really put wright down very much. He was coy about it and said he was not at the church when Rev Wright made the statements..."
Disagreements broke out among forum members over terminology used to describe Wright.
"I think it is inappropriate for us to call wright AN ANGRY BLACK PREACHER," AF stated in response to a comment by KK. "That kind of language only helps to legitimize the obama bashing."
"Just for clarity," KK answered back. "I do not think he is [an] angry black preacher. He didn't say anything that I disagreed with. He was preaching and not giving a political speech which is why the things he says have a theatrical flare and are entertaining to his congregation..."
"Our people just got the universal right to vote a little over 40 years ago," KK recounted further. "The cops were active participants in the drug trade in our communities. That means the govt actively contributed to the destruction of our families and communities. My aunt was a dope fiend whose life and murder can be connected to that proactive destruction, my father grew up in a form of defacto slavery as the oldest son of a sharecropper in North Carolina, my childhood friends did long stretches in prison for the central park jogger rape which they never committed, on someScottsboro boys type stuff. The mere mention of these facts would have white folks calling for my arrest, because it makes me appear angry and that makes them uncomfortable and afraid. But I'm not angry, I'm aware, and I'm not gonna rewrite history, or pretend to not know what happened and is happening just to make white folks comfortable. I believe that is more or less the position that Pastor Wright takes and he was in a position to speak his mind because he was only asking for things from people who saw it the same way."
Obama's pivotal and historic speech on Tuesday was examined by the forum not only for what was stated, but the reaction it received.
"It ain't the speech I'd give," member DG stated, "but I ain't runnin for president. It is however, the most *real* speech (even with my frownin at some parts) on race and such, I've ever heard from a presidential candidate...he even sends a barb at the media. I think the white folks who ate him up before, will eat up this speech... strategically wise. His enemies however, I suspect will do what they always do."
"If whites can't accept that speech well he would not have been president anyway," another forum member CB said.
Member KJ worried over how much compromising Sen. Obama would be forced to do, in order to appease white fears:
"The other day I made a comment, 'How much 'Black' Obama will be left by the time he gets to the White House if he starts compromising more and more?' Distancing himself from Wright, not calling Ferraro a racist, I get. But one always worries about the tipping point from prudent and careful to compromised. But this morning, I was saying, 'He needs to just get defiant, say I disagree with Wright, many other candidates and officials (white) have trucked with worse people than me, and I won't reject him. Let's move on.' And if America can deal with that, fine. If not, then it's not time for a BlackPrez and I'd rather his candidacy die than his character be sold out. You can't be Black in America without having some lingering anger over racism, or speaking bluntly sometimes about the unfairness of this country. And you shouldn't have to squash all that just to get elected."
KJ's initial judgment of Obama's speech included a mixture of approval and criticisms:
"Thought he meandered and danced just a bit when explaining why Blacks feel that way. A bit of an apologist tone when he kept putting Wright and others in "that old generation" that he seemed to want to leave in the past.... I think that characterization was a bit simplistic. Political, perhaps, but too simplistic. It's way more complex than than, as NPRs Michelle Norris noted when she said people need to examine why *so many* Blacks in churches across the country feel that way.... BIG POINTS for him saying he could no more reject and dismiss Wright than he could reject his own Blackness. *That's* more of the speech I would have given, but as you say, I ain'trunnin' for Prez."
"I *hope* this will die," KJ said, "the same way all those white candidates for Prez--in both parties--have gone to Bob Jones University to speak, have belonged to racist golf clubs, etc. But as OJ showed, it's still like a boogey man for them and the thought of Blacks carrying the smallest bit of anger or outrage at four centuries of racism just seems to make them cringe."
That afternoon, member TM forwarded an article by political science Professor Michael Dawson titled, Was It Too Little Too Late: Why Obama's Brilliant Speech May Not Help Him. In it, Dawson applauded Obama's speech, but pointed out that "while addressing race it equated white racial resentment (which scholars know is really just a more polite label for white racism) with the black anger and skepticism that comes out of past and current racial discrimination." Dawson however concluded, "those comments will not satisfy those large segments of white America that harbor racial resentment....even though he strongly and correctly argued that today's racial disadvantage is based on the white supremacy of the past, we know that many, many whites do not connect the black situation today to either the injustices of the past or the present."
This article set off a series of comments on the forum, that would span several days.
"To be frank," member DG said in response to the article, "we all know Obama's speech was meant mostly for white America. He has risen to his position because he has tried to transcend (at times to a fault) the issue of race in the US. For white America, his appeal came because he could be perceived (in their eyes) as "quasi-black"--or, as Chris Matthews of MSNBC put it so bluntly, he didn't carry all the sordid history of America's past that offends tender white sensibilities by telling them truths that make them uncomfortable (slavery,jim crow, etc). It means never taking whites out of their relative "comfort zone" by making them feel any bit of guilt or responsibility. Nothing Rev. Wright said shocked many in black America (except perhaps the *way* it was said), because we are long used to the Duboisian idea of the black double consciousness. Cynicism and patriotism go as hand in hand with us as Tuskegee syphilis's experiments and Tuskegee Airmen. The effectiveness of his speech is going to be gauged on how white America reacted to it...revealing at once the ugly reality of power and race in this country."
As the week wore on, and the Pastor Wright story became the favorite of both conservative and mainstream press, frustration gave way to anger and disgust. This was probably best captured in a lengthy post by KJ late Wednesday night.
"I have spent my whole life around whites, at school and on the job, and I can tell you, I have heard *way* worse stuff out of the mouths of Christians and humanitarians and my "friends" than what Wright said. I've had people make hateful, racist jokes (sexist too) and say "it's all in fun". I've been subjected to tirades of how Blacks are ruining America from people who grew up in homes three times the size of mine, yet who see nothing hypocritical in their whining while simultaneously telling me to quit blaming the world for my problems. I've had white friends say to my face that blacks dating whites was wrong. I've had dear friends literally recoil from me in confused anger if I've dared broach the subjects of racism, my dad's battles back in the day, or how America still ain't quite right. It's as if I were trying to make them drink gasoline or something."
"But if America still can't have that conversation, if they still don't have the ability to shut up and let us really *talk* for a change and *listen* to us, then so be it. If they can't look in the mirror and see that ugly reflection, finally *face* that pain and responsibility and yes, guilt, and take some of this crap off our shoulders, then it's their loss. I don't want to have a President of color who can't have that conversation with the people. And if Barak loses because of this, then America really is, still, sadly, damned. Maybe it ain't "God damn America", maybe it's just "America damn America". They're doing it to themselves."
By the time AF forwarded an article to the forum by Roy Exum called The Angry White Man, recounting the importance of white male resentment in American politics, members were just about fed up. KK posted a lengthy retort to the article and the entire idea of "justifiable white anger."
"That angry white article was the biggest load of crap I've heard in a while. These white men are angry because they are ignorant, they have no comprehension of capitalism and therefore hate mexicans and blacks who 'take' their jobs; and mention nothing of the corporate bosses who closed the factories and moved them to Mexico. They aren't sophisticated, though they may be college educated. They are coddled, spoiled men, who have never been spoken to bluntly before. When they are criticized they become angry. They have no conception of history or US's role in shaping the world of the last 100-200 years, so when they hear anything negative about the country they love, they call it unpatriotic."
"They think and express their political thoughts in platitudes, and they are easily manipulated by the news media. They gather much of their info from Fox news. They were duped by dubya in the last 2 elections, and this is how you know they aren't sharp. Yeah, they're angry, but so is my daughter when i snatch a pair of scissors out of her hand. Their anger is misplaced, and I am disgusted everytime i hear about an angry white male. These are white men who only perceive their anger as legitimate."
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Eating Their Collective Feet- News Pundits & Obama
DOH!
So Barack Obama narrowly lost the New Hampshire primary. While I endorse neither Hillary Clinton, or Obama for that matter, there was a bit of glee in watching those returns come in Tuesday night. The political punditry of the mainstream corporate news, who had gone into an Obama-gush fest just days earlier, was left sputtering and trying to explain how all their prophetic predictions of Obama's inevitable rise and Hillary's coming doom could have been so WRONG. Their humiliation alone was worth the outcome of the primary. While they have been puzzling for days now what could have gone wrong, here's a suggestion to add to the mix of likely numerous factors.
All that crowing over Obama's Iowa win may have backfired. The media's herd mentality in declaring the end of Hillary Clinton (eagerly writing her obituary while she was still very much alive), and endorsing Obama as the abstract "change" candidate, may have turned numerous New Hampshire voters off. Perhaps the lily white constituents, reaching down to some good ol' fashioned American racism, didn't like that the media made a white woman cry over a black male candidate. Or maybe it's as simple as no one likes to be told for whom they should vote. When the media were glorifying Hillary Clinton it eventually led to declining poll numbers. Their unabashed endorsement of Obama may have done the same for him.
The good news? American voters may have finally grown weary of arrogant media pundits who think it's their right, privilege and duty to annoint candidates and control the dynamics of a political race. Whatever the case, what Obama's narrow loss in Iowa showed was that the race for president is still fluid, still open and won't be decided by the whims of obviously over-paid corporate news media celebrities.
Some articles below on the debacle of the media and New Hampshire primary
The Race is On
The first lesson to take from the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary is to throw the pundits, pollsters and kingmakers out the window. Armed with smug self-certainty and the slippery intelligence of numbers, they tried to declare the race for President over even before it began.
full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/editors
A Platter of Crow for the Pundits
*added Jan. 11, 2008
As we have an official Election Day, there ought to be a new national holiday called Eating Crow Day, when we the people who had to watch the nation's army of pundits, pollsters, anchormen and cable news opinionators get to digest their predictions and analyze where they went wrong.
Not since Literary Digest predicted Alf Landon would beat FDR in 1936--a coup it managed to pull off by polling only people with phones during the Great Depression--has there been the need for such a day of mourning after Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in New Hampshire.
full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/kitman
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