Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed

W.E.B. DuBois to describe the vanguard of educated blacks who would lead blacks to liberation, performed their usual role of using the election of their fellow Talented Tenther to scold the black “underclass” for their behavior. The rich white men who own the media used these writers to act as a buffer between their white subscribers and blacks whose views might make them uncomfortable. Since these writers have little financial control over media that air their views, they behave as independent contractors for newspapers, cable and think tanks whose sales pitch originates with the penny press of the 1830s, which, like today’s media, viewed its market as that of white males. Rev. Barbara Reynolds was fired from USA Today for not comforting this demographic; apparently Zambia-born Amy Holmes whom USA Today hired did. Ms. Holmes described as a “Republican Strategist” is an all purpose black right-winger who is shuttled from cable show to show when someone is needed to take down black people and President Obama. She and other African-born intellectuals promote the stereotype that the immigrant African intellectuals and writers are acceptable to corporate media and academia because they are less confrontational than traditional black Americans, as one white Louisiana professor told me after a few drinks. We hear very little about African immigrant intellectuals, writers and public intellectuals who have formed an alliance with their African-American counterparts.
    Today’s media, like the old penny presses, market the moral superiority of whites. Black moral failures are played up while those of whites—widespread drug addiction, unmarried motherhood and crime—are underreported, or when reported, spinned.
    When the Republican Party nominated Mrs. Sarah Palin, the head of a dysfunctional family, as vice-presidential candidate, all of a sudden unmarried pregnancy became a hip thing and some of the white pundits gave a glimpse into the dysfunction in the white community, inadvertently.
    Obtaining information about what goes on behind the curtains of Mall Land is like it was getting information about unrest behind the Iron Curtain in the old days. Reporting as some of those pundits did on Morning Joe that “every family had a case like Bristol Palin” indicates that unmarried motherhood among whites is more widespread than the media reports. After the election it was revealed that the Palin family had splurged on GOP funds for their own fashion interests without Mrs. Palin being called a “welfare queen,” and on December 20, 2008, Sherry L. Johnston, the future mother-in-law of Bristol, Mrs. Palin’s unmarried daughter, was busted in Wasilla, Alaska, for charges “…in relation to the drug Oxycontin.”
    Judging from products created by white writers, who have a monopoly over how blacks are depicted in literature, television and the movies, you’d think, if you watched merchandise like The Wire , that drugs were a black problem, exclusively. The only difference between a writer like David Simon, whose television series The Wire appeals to the feelings of white moral superiority, and a publisher like James Gordon Bennett, whose 1830s newspaper circulated stories of blacks committing cannibalism (a story that makes it into The New York Times Magazine section from time to time), is that Simon’s profitable enterprise of selling white moral superiority reaches a world-wide audience—an audience that makes judgments about black Americans based on products like his. (As a result of the profits earned by The Wire , Allen Hughes, a black filmmaker, has been hired by HBO to do a series about an aging black pimp who is under attack by violent younger pimps. It’s to be filmed on location in Oakland where members of other ethnic groups are actually making more money at it; some have been at it since the Gold Rush. Think that HBO would do a story about the