Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media (23 page)

On the day that personnel from Blackwater, the off-the-shelf corporate warriors employed by the government, were acquitted for killing seventeen Iraqi citizens, progressive Ed Schultz was commenting on Tiger Woods' relationship with a porn star.

He spent a program on December 27 on Tiger, and two callers complained about Tiger's being rude to their children. He failed to mention Tiger Woods' contributions to charity. The
Orange County Register
was one of the few sites that noted his contributions.

Say what you will about Tiger Woods and his latest antics. The golf star's OC-based nonprofit foundations raised more than $50 million and spent more than $40 million last year, and got high marks from charity watchdogs.

His contribution to charity was also ignored by sports writer David Zirin of
The Nation
, who criticized the athlete for not being activist enough.

On
Reliable Sources
, Kurtz linked Obama to Chris Brown, a black singer who was the subject of months of media scorn for assaulting his girlfriend.

About the host of
Reliable Sources
, Howard Kurtz, Jamison Foser of
Media Matters
wrote that “Kurtz just couldn't get Tiger off his mind,” and as if to validate Foser's opinion, Kurtz came back to Tiger for a third program aired on Sunday, January 10, which turned into a feast of hypocrisy. Kurtz and David Brody of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network defended Brit Hume's comment that Tiger Woods had a better chance at redemption from Christianity than from Buddhism. Brody saw nothing wrong with Hume's statement, because “Jesus is the god of creation.” Brody said that Hume's remark was problematical since it dissed other religions. Hume went to Fox's Bill O'Reilly to defend his comments about Tiger's converting to Christianity, which raises the question, how is that band of god-fearing Christians at Fox News behaving?
DemocraticUnderground.com
reports:

To be sure, in promoting the rumor of a Hume-Kendall tryst, Schur had help from reality. Hume's wife of thirteen years, Kim Schiller Hume, headed the Washington bureau until recently; a report in the
New York Daily News
suggested that marital tensions had played a large role in her departure. Kendall, meanwhile, is recently divorced. As of today, in fact, she is reverting to her maiden name, Megyn Kelly, for on-air use.

Moreover, getting involved with an underling is virtually par for the course for Fox higher-ups. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of FNC parent News Corp., embarked on an affair with his current wife, Wendi Deng, when she was an employee of the Star TV affiliate, and married her in 1999. Roger Ailes, now chairman of Fox Television Stations, divorced his second wife, Norma, in 1995 and went on to marry his current wife, Beth Tilson, who had been his second-in-command at
America's Talking
. And star pundit Bill O'Reilly famously described elaborate sexual fantasies over the phone to one of his producers, Andrea Mackris, leading to harassment allegations and a settlement of undisclosed size (reportedly around two million dollars).

As though begging for intervention, Kurtz added a second segment devoted to Tiger Woods. This time Gilbert Arenas, a basketball player who had brought a gun into the Washington Wizards' locker room, was brought on as an extra added attraction. This panel included two white men. Sports writer Mike Wise gave Arenas and Tiger some slack.

We're all flawed, he said. He was opposed by Buzz Bissinger whose
Vanity Fair
prose was used in an attempt to dignify a topless portrait of Tiger photographed by Annie Leibovitz, a woman who is obviously desperate to pay off her debts. Bissinger scolded both Arenas and Tiger for displaying “a false image,” before Wise challenged him to take an “inventory” of his own life. Bissinger's comments show that separate but equalism exists even among the billionaire class, as evidenced by the media thrashing that Reginald Lewis, a billionaire, received as he was dying. A billionairess whom Dominick Dunne suspected of murdering her husband was able to get a story about Dunne's suspicions killed at
Vanity Fair
.

On February 21, it was Tiger again whom a woman sports writer from USA Today compared to President Obama, O.J. and Kobe Bryant. Extra added attraction in another black-men and domestic violence media sideshow was Gary Coleman being grilled by second-generation black-male basher, Lisa Bloom.

Given the fact that most of Woods' choices were Nordic types, could this be a case of shiksa envy on Kurtz's part, or maybe Kurtz should begin an Obama/Tiger recovery group. (Ironically, one of the sponsors of this particular show was National Car Rental whose pitchman was wife beater, John McEnroe.) As though he were competing with Diane Dimond, the Tiger segments were followed by one about Warren Beatty's seduction count. Kurtz is becoming a regular old media ho.

Progressive Ed Schultz, a radio talk jock, could join the recovery. He wasn't the only commentator linking Obama to Woods to Chris Brown to Michael Vick in a sort of media chain gang of shame.
Media Matters
titled its December articles: “
Newsmax
's Lowell Ponte compares Obama to Tiger Woods: ‘eager to give cold cash to get hot love' at climate change conference,” and “Fox Nation: ‘Why Obama is Worse than Tiger?'” Fox's shock jock Glenn Beck compared Tiger with O.J. Simpson. (A black comedian appearing on a show sponsored by Shaquille O'Neal, the basketball star, said that during 2009, blacks got Obama and whites got O.J.)

And, of course, O.J. Simpson was tossed into the mix. While Tiger Woods was said by Frank Rich and others to represent the corruption at the end of this decade, O.J. Simpson was chosen to represent the end of the Millennium, no less, and while Rich associated Tiger with the Enron scandals, in 1997, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston put on an “End Of The Millennium” show curated by Christoph Grunenberg, in which O.J. Simpson was linked to Chernobyl!

The white progressives and liberals who had supported Obama in the beginning had begun sharing the right's enthusiasm for assailing the president. For progressive Amy Goodman, he was uppity; she criticized his “swooping” into the scene of the Copenhagen climate change conference. On January 1, during her annual retrospective program, Obama was subjected to withering criticism by her guests and this was followed the next day on progressive Pacifica radio, by Doug Henwood, a Marxist economist, who was just as unrelenting in his criticism of Obama. Even while admitting on his Pacifica show, aired on January 9, that manufacturing jobs were beginning to return, he, using the kind of language that slave masters used when trapping the movements of a fugitive slave, referred to Obama as “slippery” and like some others who are treating nonwhite voters as invisible, noted that Obama was “losing his friends.”

Sam Roberts, who is a kind of Paul Revere for white nationalism, a man thrilled by the fact that whites with children are re-populating Manhattan and that Harlem no longer has a black majority, noted, maybe with alarm, that a coalition of nonwhites almost elected an obscure black politician over Mayor Bloomberg who spent over one hundred million during his campaign for Mayor of New York, yet white progressives still view themselves as Obama's base ignoring the fact that Southern blacks provided him with his winning margins in the South and Hispanics in the West. Both the mainstream and progressive whites have ignored this harbinger of things to come.

As an example of hypocritical posturing of media, white males who scold black men, like the divorcees and adulterers who praised Obama's lecturing black fathers, David Letterman poked fun at Tiger Woods' problems in his Top Ten Text Messages sent by Tiger. David Letterman still has his sponsors, without any protest from the white feminists at
Huffington Post
and
Salon.com
, progressive sites that are outdoing
The National Enquirer
in their obsession with Tiger Woods. Among Letterman's sponsors are Old Navy, Lipitor, H&R Block, Verizon, Direct TV and leading automobile and film companies.

The Kurtz panel decided that Letterman's exploitation of the women working for him was different from Tiger's relationship with women who were not employees of his, because Letterman confessed to his sexual transgression immediately, when some might argue that his extortionist forced him to do so.

When blacks complain that they are treated differently from whites, they might find confirmation during the last week in December. Charlie Sheen, a movie star whose face is recognized by millions the world over, was arrested for threatening his wife with a knife, an occurrence that wasn't mentioned during
The Reliable Sources
program that was aired on December 27, nor was there any discussion about his possibly losing his advertising contract with an underwear manufacturer. They dropped him, but CBS doesn't seem in a hurry to drop
Two and a Half Men
, starring Charlie Sheen, which, at the end of 2009, drew eleven million viewers.

In her autobiography,
A Paper Life
, Tatum O'Neal claims she was abused by her tennis-ace husband John McEnroe. She said that “the hot-headed sportsman regularly beat her up after his tantrums on the tennis court and claims he was a heavy cannabis smoker,” yet National Car Rental doesn't seem eager to drop him as a spokesperson. If Tiger had threatened his wife with a knife as Charlie Sheen had done or beaten her as McEnroe beat Tatum O'Neal would he still have his advertisers? Or if he had confessed his dalliances with other women when threatened by an extortionist?

When
The Wall Street Journal
asked me to comment about Tiger's situation I said that he should seek advice from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Women who were employed by Hollywood chose to remain anonymous when complaining about sexual advances against them by movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though sportscaster Stephen Smith said that through his “antics” Tiger had alienated women, none of the complaints from women who had been sexually harassed by Schwarzenegger (Tiger's affairs were consensual), reported in a story from
The Los Angeles Times
, seemed to cause his alienation from women. On October 31, 2006,
Uprisingradio.com
reported:

During Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for governor in the 2003 recall election, a number of women came forward to reveal their sexual harassment and assault by Arnold.
The Los Angeles Times
printed extensive reports just prior to that election. Now, just three years later, there is almost no mention of Arnold's sexist escapades. But some women are refusing to remain silent. More than a hundred women from across California have signed a letter to remind voters of the seriousness of the accusations of sixteen women against Schwarzenegger that surfaced during the 2003 recall campaign, and those that have surfaced since then involving minors.

Nevertheless, in 2003, he carried the women's vote and, after his election, family-values spokesperson Senator Orrin Hatch proposed that the laws be changed so that he could run for president.

Racists are identified as those who are unable to distinguish between members of one race from another. That certainly appeared to be the case of the media and the country's spreading Negro mania, mania being the word used by
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, which observed that Tiger mania was the biggest story to inspire mania since O.J. Simpson. One wonders which black male celebrity caught in a scandal will define the end of this decade.

David Carr is hipper than most white journalists. He was probably amused when he read a clueless column written by his colleague Frank Rich in which Imus-defender Rich said that the media's reaction to Tiger's problems had nothing to do with race. Tell that to
Vanity Fair
magazine, which ran a half-naked photo of Tiger Woods taken by Annie Leibovitz, who drew criticism for a previous photo of LeBron James that was based upon a World War I propaganda poster of a gorilla carrying off a white woman. Joan Walsh wrote on
Salon.com
:

Vanity Fair
should be ashamed of itself. The Thug Life photo of Tiger Woods that graces the magazine's February cover will go down in history with
Time
's “darkened” O.J. Simpson cover and
Vogue
's portrait of a brutish LeBron James carrying off a blond princess two years ago. I've always defended Woods' freedom to call himself Cablinasian, as befitting his mixed heritage. But
Vanity Fair
just proved the arguments of black people who dislike what they see as Woods' racial dodge. He'll always be black, but especially after he gets in trouble.

A black man exposed as a lover of Nordic-type white women has nothing to do with race? Rich hasn't read the sick disgusting blogs about Tiger's affairs written by white people who didn't go to Harvard.

David Carr on the other hand has been around and knows the streets. He knows for example that the media's description that crack is a black drug is false because he has smoked crack with white people (See:
The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story of His Life
). He was among the first to identify the media stories about widespread looting, rape and mayhem among black Katrina victims as being based upon exaggerations and lies. While complaints by blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans about media coverage for over one hundred years have been ignored or patronized, Carr at least acknowledges that the mainstream media have been accused of “pathologizing” black men, yet his explanation was in my mind unsatisfactory. (He also ignored the growing anger among blacks about the film
Precious
, which he admires). He wrote:

Mainstream media have been accused of pathologizing the African-American male, but—let's face it—three men who happened to be black moved a lot of units this year. Just try to imagine this past year in media without President Obama, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods. And lest you think it was all pathology and politics, it is worth noting that on Twitter, the elections in Iran outranked Michael Jackson, who came in second, according to
What the Trend,
a site that ranked topics in 2009 (whatthetrend.com/zeitgeist). In an age that is ridiculed as chronically unserious, a life-and-death struggle for freedom on the other side of the world is the story that rang the bell on Twitter.