The week before, Matthew Continetti, appearing on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources, December 20, gave Barack Obama a C. Mr. Continetti is the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin. He’s employed by The Weekly Standard, a publication that was recently purchased by a wealthy Christian fundamentalist. One panel member was media juror Diane Dimond, a sleazy tabloid wag, a Michael Jackson stalker and pal of Jackson’s persecutor and prosecutor, District Attorney “Mad Dog” Sneddon. During the show, Dimond, one of the most repugnant of tabloid personalities, who had rented a boat to go out and snoop about Tiger Woods’ dwellings, lectured the viewers about personal morality.
Years from now, when the corporate media is stored away in a print and electronic museum, mercifully, media historians will mark a phase of its final period as being dominated by tabloid types like Dimond. I believe that this began when respectable journalists began appearing with reporters from The National Enquirer during the O.J. trial. This tabloid infection has even influenced the progressive media with places like progressive Air America getting as down and dirty as the supermarket tabloids. Bill Press, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and other progressives devoted considerable amount of time to Michael Jackson and Tiger.
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.”