In October, Fox’s John Stossel actually appeared before audiences where he opposed what his sponsor, Americans for Prosperity, called a government insurance plan. The New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote:
This was conservatives’ seething summer of discontent and unhinged hysteria: town halls, tea parties and tirades. They captured headlines and gained momentum. Misinformation ran amuck. President Obama’s approval ratings tumbled. Through it all, Obama maintained a Pollyannaish, laissez-faire disposition. Some found this worrisome. Others, like me, even thought it weak. But maybe not so fast.
According to Gallup poll results released on Wednesday, the president’s approval rating has stopped falling and has leveled out in the low-50 percents, about the same as Ronald Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s at this point in their presidencies (both two-termers, lest we forget).
An example of how the media have presented a few loud demonstrators to represent the thinking of the public occurred on October 13. After a conservative health bill passed a Senate committee, CNN’s Tom Foreman used footage of the same tea baggers rudely interrupting congresspersons to announce that the public was against the legislation. This was the theme of the cable shows and even Sunday talk shows that feign seriousness. On this issue and others the wealthy individuals who lurk behind the talk show screamers and who obey a gentleman’s agreement not to criticize each other, use their ownership of the airwaves to construct a false reality. They got us coming and going. Not only do they own the media, but finance the think tank “policy analysts” who are frequent guests on their shows. This is why Obama continues to be judged by all-white panels on CNN’s State of the Union, ABC’s This Week, C-Span’s The Washington Journal, which provides a service by exposing the abysmal ignorance of some Americans each day, Fox News Sunday, NBC’s Meet The Press and CBS’s Face The Nation. Given the dearth of those who share the background of those constituencies that voted overwhelmingly for Obama, blacks, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and others, President Obama will continue to be judged by an all-white, mostly male, middle-aged jury, some of whom like Alex Castellanos, have designed racist campaigns and others like Mary Matalin who have shepherded scurrilous swift-boat styled propaganda campaigns against the president, and David Gregory, who defended Don Imus’s racist outbursts until the very end. On the morning of November 8, 2009, after the House passed a health bill that included a public option, after pundits of the left predicted that it wouldn’t up until the night before it passed, David Brooks, one of the most powerful of the country’s pundits, with a column in The New York Times, was brought on to Imus-defender David Gregory’s show, Meet The Press, to criticize the president on an all-white (one woman) panel. David Brooks is a neo-con who backed the invasion of Iraq, a multi-trillion-dollar calamity, yet complains about the president’s fiscal policies. He says his mentor is the late Irving Kristol and wrote that Bush won in 2004 because he carried states with high “white fertility rates” those who wanted to escape “vulgarity.”
How did the public feel about those who shouted down the proponents of health care legislation at the town meetings and who were boosted by the Infotainment media?
Most Americans say the tone of the debate has been negative. According to the latest weekly News Interest Index survey, conducted September 11–14 among 1,003 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 53 percent say the tone of the debate over health care has been generally rude and disrespectful; 31 percent say it has been generally polite and respectful and 16 percent do not offer an opinion. Among those who say the debate has been rude and disrespectful, most believe that opponents of the health care legislation under consideration are to blame. By a 59 percent to 17 percent margin, more blame opponents than supporters of the legislation; 17 percent volunteer that both groups are to blame. (Pew Research Center, 16 September 2009)
The Huffington Post discovered that one of CNN’s panel regulars was in the insurance business. Alex Castellanos, a right-wing Cuban American. This is the same man who designed the ad showing a black hand taking a job from a white hand, an anti-affirmative action ad, which led to the defeat of a black senatorial candidate, yet CNN uses him to comment on the actions of a black president. If that were not enough, in October it was revealed that Castellanos’ firm actually created ads on behalf of the insurance industry that was spending over three hundred million dollars, according to London’s Guardian, to defeat the public option.
Alex Castellanos is a regular CNN contributor, but one of Castellanos’ secret identities is being the media buyer for one of the ad campaigns bankrolled by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a major industry trade group fighting strenuously against health care reform. Castellanos was responsible for placing more than $1 million of AHIP advertising in five states.
CNN said that they didn’t know about his ties to the insurance industry.
With the exception of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, very rarely did the cable networks mention that the insurance industry spent millions to stage these demonstrations. The Guardian put the amount at over three hundred fifty million dollars.
The industry and interest groups have spent $380m (£238m) in recent months influencing healthcare legislation through lobbying, advertising and in direct political contributions to members of Congress. The largest contribution, totaling close to $1.5m, has gone to the chairman of the senate committee drafting the new law.
Barack Obama made a speech in Africa, criticizing African governments for taking bribes. Over here, we call them “campaign contributions.”
If cable had been around during the Eisenhower administration, leaders of fringe groups like the John Birch Society would have been given equal time with administration officials. Joe McCarthy would have been designated as the Republican Party’s leader. Next to Joe Wilson, McCarthy was eloquent. All Wilson had to do for cable to grant him prominence was to call the president a liar during the president’s speech to Congress, which was like taking a piss in public.
The dilemma faced by black intellectuals like me who are sometimes critical of Obama is similar to that faced by some Israeli intellectuals whom I met during my second trip to Israel. Though they found Ariel Sharon’s policies abhorrent — given the opposition to the former prime minister by outsiders — they found themselves supporting the odious prime minster.
When blacks see people showing up at Obama rallies with guns and the ugly racist signs aimed at the president; when they are informed of “The Obama Effect,” a phrase for the unprecedented arming of whites throughout the nation, and when they are assaulted by a media for which the president can’t win for losing — a sort of electronic white-power government in exile — a Republican Party and other assorted Nigger Breakers, who have raised the vilest and most salacious attacks on the president since that directed at Abraham Lincoln by the Confederate media, they find themselves rallying behind one of their own.
Going Old South on Obama
Ma and Pa Clinton Flog Uppity Black Man2
(Black public intellectuals and politicians accused the Clinton campaign of using racist tactics against Barack Obama. The Clintons denied the accusation and the media backed them up. But after the campaign, a report about the Clinton strategy was published and it showed that the aim of the campaign was to paint Obama as different. As someone who was not like us. Mark Penn’s campaign memo of March 19, 2007 was printed in the August 11, 2008 issue of The Atlantic: