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6. Under Press-ure: Overcoming the Media and Its Mavens?
- University of Illinois Press
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SIX Under Press-ure Overcoming the Media and Its Mavens? HERb bOyD Before Barack Hussein Obama became the forty-fourth President of the United States, his campaign was viewed in three major ways by the media: There were those who cheered him along; those uncertain what to make of him but who retained a tame, mainstream, “wait and see” perspective ; and those whose views ranged from “critically supportive” to firmly opposed . Since his election, there has been little change in these assessments, though at this time there is a clearer delineation between those for and against Obama in the mainstream media as they gather a better understanding of his pragmatic tendencies on policy and issues. But it’s been the president’s pragmatism, his fence-sitting, that makes him vulnerable from the left and the right. These attacks were evident during the primary and they intensified during the national election contest between Obama and Sen. John McCain. In his primary race against Sen. Hillary Clinton, the ideological distinctions were not as sharp and this may have been the reason the mainstream media was in a state of flux and ambivalence. There were occasions when the prevailing attitude and treatment was one of exhilaration and exuberant praise, only to be replaced within hours with cautious skepticism, if not utter contempt. Much of this vacillation could be related to race or ideology or the fact that he was trailing in the polls or a front-runner or various other factors. 112 . HERb bOyD The aim here is to see how Obama’s candidacy—and to some extent those first one hundred days in office—fared with the media, particularly where corporations, advertisement, and the exigencies of capitalism intersect. To some extent, as a reporter assigned to cover the Democratic national convention in Denver and later in Chicago on election night, I was able to gather a bit of anecdotal feelings from the press contingent about Obama, but even under these circumstances—given the guarded nature and competitiveness of reporters and photographers—one is left with only a hazy notion of how they felt about Obama since most of them were preoccupied with getting a scoop or to score an interview with one of the bigwigs at the events. For the last year or so, I have been a panelist with Imhotep Gary Byrd on his shows on several radio and internet outlets in the New York City metropolitan area, and this has given me an additional perspective on the media based on the impressions of my fellow panelists Milton Allimadi, publisher of the Black Star News, and Cash Michaels, a reporter who resides in North Carolina and writes there for several local publications, as well as the numerous calls we received during our broadcasts. Without exception, Obama was the darling of the Black press, which should not come as a surprise to anyone, though these papers, possibly for the sake of so-called objectivity, occasionally employed columnists who found it easy to criticize Obama and take him to task for his stance on a particular issue. For example, the New York Amsterdam News, the nation’s oldest and largest African American weekly, has two columnists—Armstrong Williams and Alton Maddox—and neither was consistently friendly or supportive of Obama’s quest for the White House. There were also a number of online publications that found Obama’s candidacy less than admirable and fueled their commentaries with a need to keep his feet to the fire, and none was more vociferous and critical than those commentators from the Black left. Their critique of Obama was mainly seen within the context of their general opprobrium for electoral politics and no real appreciation for either major political party. Thus Obama, through their lens, was nothing more than an opportunity for the ruling class to present its case and to continue its global dominance in the guise of a black face. Few journalists were as passionately outspoken in this regard as Glen Ford, the executive editor of the online publication The Black Agenda Report. As early as the summer of 2007, Ford, in an article for Counterpunch, voiced his feelings about Obama and the nature of his bid for the Oval Office. “Barack Obama is the antithesis of Black Power,” he observed, “a man who promises with every word he speaks, with every nuance of phrase and body language, and through his voting record as a U.S. Senator, that he personifies the definitive end of...