Like a mob trampling over one another as the doors open for an Xmas sale, it was a consensus among outlets as diverse as The Daily Beast and Fox News that the first week of February 2009, was “Obama’s Bad Week.” How did the public feel about what the media described as Obama’s bad week? The polls gave him high ratings. Gallup was sixty-nine percent, CBS, seventy-nine percent, CNN, six out of ten gave him high ratings, McClatchy Ipsos sixty-nine percent. Of course these approval ratings will fluctuate, but it was clear during this week who or where was the source of Obama’s opposition. While he might head the executive branch of government, his wealthy enemies, whose profits he wishes to diminish, and who represent a tiny fraction of public opinion, are able to magnify that tiny fraction through their ownership of the American media. At the same time Howard Kurtz and others will deny that this is happening. They will continue to claim that the media are being seduced by Obama. So now we have a situation where the media decide the outcome of elections — McCain said that they were his constituency — decide the outcome of trials before the accused has set a foot inside of a courtroom, and behave as a sort of government in exile. Something has changed in American politics when a pill-popping talk show host has become the head of a family-values political party. But in comparison to some of the fulmination rising from the margins, which was given tacit approval from the Republican Party, Limbaugh’s entertaining rants about the president were mild and of course given attention from the ratings-hungry media those voices from the fringes were given round the clock treatment by cable. Much of the hatred was fueled by Sarah Palin whose speeches inspired shouts of “kill him,” and “nigger” from her crowds. By the fall of 2009, a writer for Newsmax was wondering aloud about a military coup and The Boston Globe, in a chilling report asked whether the Secret Service was capable of protecting the president and his family.
Under the headline: “Obama Risks a Domestic Military Intervention,” John L. Perry wrote:
Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.
A poll of New Jersey voters revealed that twelve percent believed that Obama was the anti-Christ, and a large percentage of Republicans still maintained that he was born in Kenya.
As usual, the corporate media was designing an America that was markedly different from the one that was reflected by the polls. Appearing on Morning Joe, a reporter from Rolling Stone, who unmasked the influence upon the town halls of the insurance companies, which spent three hundred and eighty million dollars in their effort to derail the health plan’s public option, was challenged by Pat Buchanan, who still maintains that his boss Richard Nixon was wronged, and Canadian-born millionaire, Mort Zukerman. Buchanan and Zukerman insisted that the corporate-manipulated town hall meetings and the 9/12 Washington demonstrations organized by tea baggers were genuine and reflected the mood of the country, which was anti big government. However, Max Blumenthal, a Nation contributor, interviewed some of the marchers. He discovered that they were ignorant of the issues and many didn’t know why they were there.
Zukerman, who has been very critical of Obama, turned up later on Lou Dobbs’ show on CNN to criticize Obama for his attempt to have the Olympic Games in Chicago. His black employee, Errol Louis of The Daily News, who survived the purge of black reporters that occurred when Zukerman took over, agreed with his boss. Amazingly, Lewis poses as a progressive on Air America affiliate WWRL 1600.
So insistent on Obama’s failure, the staff at Murdoch’s The Weekly Standard erupted into cheers when it was announced that the Olympics would not be held in the United States. The Weekly Standard had been recently purchased by a Christian fundamentalist billionaire named Phil Anschutz who makes his money in oil and real estate. When Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, NPR, in the midst of firing some of its black personnel, brought on a Weekly Standard contributor to denounce the Nobel Prize committee for awarding Obama the prize, lending credence to Kofi Natambu’s lack of confidence in NPR. So dire was the firing of blacks at NPR, which receives public funds, that the National Association of Black Journalists sent a letter. If Obama or members of his family are harmed, the same media that encouraged and in the case of Fox News, helped to organize the tea-baggers, will argue that with his policies he brought it on himself. As I predicted when asked to comment on his election by The Oakland Tribune, Obama is a centrist and to the right on some issues, but the infotainment media have cast him as a radical, a socialist, a Marxist, and a Muslim who was born in Kenya. The majority, forty-seven economists, polled by The Wall Street Journal, agreed that a recovery is underway and even Paul Krugman, who had been appointed the president’s rival, appearing on This Week in October gave the president some faint praise, and while doing so revealed his fellow panelists’ ignorance about the subject of economics. They were Peggy Noonan and George Will. On October 13, 2009, The Oakland Tribune reported a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics that “Eighty percent of economists believe that the recession is over and an expansion had begun, but they expect the recovery will be slow as worries over unemployment and high federal debt persist.” By October 30, Barack Obama and his team had saved the country from a depression yet so pathological is white supremacy that the threats against his life have increased by four hundred percent. If any harm comes to him, the same media that are creating an atmosphere where such a deed is possible will blame the president. They’ll give him some of the tough love that he and his fellow Harvard elite deal to blacks. They’ll say that because of his Marxist leanings, he brought it on himself.
Blaming the victim is nothing new in American history. Francis Parkman, who has been called the greatest of American historians, blamed the seizure of Indian lands and the extermination of some Indian tribes on the Indians. He said “the Indians melted away, not because civilization destroyed them, but because their own ferocity and intractable indolence made it impossible that they should exist in its presence.” Sound familiar? The cynical minds who serve the shareholders of NBC, CNN and Fox have used this explanation to make big bucks with little investment on their part, only the Indians have become blacks and Latinos. Noticing that CNN got high ratings from its blame-the-victim stunt, Black In America, MSNBC teamed Bill Cosby up with Michelle Bernard, a hired black mouth for the far right, who, following the neo-con line, and prompted by her funders, says that personal responsibility is a problem peculiar to black men. She’s also a global-warming denier, and believes that we should go easy on the rich because after all they are creating all of the wealth, according to her. She is one of those who are spreading lies about Obama’s health proposals. Bernard, president and CEO of the far- right funded Independent Women’s Forum, has written:
More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama’s nationalized healthcare onslaught.