Gray Lady Down (11 page)

A double standard has been manifest in how the
Times
treats black political figures, going easy on black demagogues such as Louis Farrakhan and machine politicians such as New York City’s first black mayor, David Dinkins. And it has practically given a gold-plated free pass to New York’s premier racial agitator, Al Sharpton.

No matter what his sins against the civic fabric—Tawana Brawley, Crown Heights, the Harlem Massacre at Freddy’s Department Store—Sharpton has been rehabilitated on a regular basis. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1993, the
Times Magazine
ran a cover story called “The Reformation of a Street Preacher.” Omitting his more incendiary remarks during the 1991 Crown Heights riots and his controversial actions at other racially fraught moments, the magazine said that Sharpton was now “softer, more focused, more intellectually polished.” His comments about “white interlopers” had certainly raised the rabble in the 1995 Harlem Massacre, which culminated when a black militant set fire to a Jewish-owned department store next to a black-owned record business that was losing its lease, after which he shot a number of the department store’s employees, resulting in seven deaths in addition to that of the gunman, who took his own life. But the
Times
threw another life preserver to Sharpton, who was “Buoyant in a Storm” according to a report by Charisse Jones. Ignoring the damning evidence of his role in the massacre, Jones said that Sharpton was playing the role of “consoler, conciliator and political jouster.” She even let Sharpton claim the victim’s mantle: “In my life I’ve had to walk alone sometimes.... I’ve been lied on, I’ve been talked about, mistreated, stabbed and indicted. But through it all, I’ve learned to trust in Jesus. I’ve learned to trust in God. It’s only a test.”

More recently, in 2008, Sharpton attached the loaded term “greedy” to Anthony Weiner, a New York City councilman (now a U.S. congressman) who is Jewish. The slur elicited no response from any
Times
columnists or its editorial board. As the urban
historian Fred Siegel observed in the wake of the Harlem Massacre, “After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he’s really reformed.” And the
Times
—along with other media—effaces the facts of Sharpton’s role from the public record “Stalinist-style,” stuffing them down a “memory hole.”

It’s one thing for the
Times’
double standards to throw a lifeline to a race hustler like Al Sharpton, allowing him to secure respectability as a national civil rights leader despite an ongoing record of racial arson. Yet it was something else when the
Times
became a pep squad for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. When John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, said during the campaign that the
Times
was “completely, totally, 150% in the tank” for Obama, he was dismissed as a biased observer. But the charge itself sticks. Mark Halperin, a straight shooter from
Time
magazine, uses the
New York Times’
reporting as Exhibit A in making a case that coverage of the 2008 campaign was “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.”

Halperin did not analyze the underlying reasons for that bias, but looking through the
Times’
coverage it is absolutely clear that the favoritism is racial. The first and foremost example of favoritism toward Obama in the
New York Times
was the protective coverage it offered regarding his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Obama had belonged to Trinity United for nearly two decades, and credited Wright’s sermons as a major factor in bringing him to Christianity. Obama was married there and his two daughters were baptized there too. Wright blessed Obama’s house, and Obama says that one of Wright’s sermons furnished the title of his second book,
The Audacity of Hope.

In a sermon delivered on the Sunday after September 11, 2001, Wright notoriously told his congregation that the United States had brought on al-Qaeda’s attacks because of its own terrorism:

Other sermons included charges that the U.S. government invented AIDS to kill black people, and that Israel and South Africa invented an ethnic bomb that would kill Arabs and blacks but spare whites and Jews. Wright endorsed Louis Farrakhan—anti-Semitism and all—and traveled with him to visit Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He called the United States “the U.S. of KKK A,” and recommended that the slogan “God bless America” be changed to “God damn America.”

Yet even with all this material so readily available, when Obama disinvited Wright from making the invocation at the official launch of his presidential campaign in March 2007, the
Times
reported on Wright’s radical comments in a way that blandly euphemized them, and characterized Trinity United as a “mainstream” church, scrubbing the more extreme aspects of its Afrocentric theological bearings. A follow-up article by Jodi Kantor at the end of April referred to Wright as “a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.” Kantor referred to Wright’s “assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government,” but left out the “God damn America,” and instead of reporting that Wright believed and preached that the U.S. government invented AIDS as a tool of racial euthanasia, she merely said that “Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis.” Of the controversial 9/11 remarks, she simply wrote that “On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies.”

Kantor also gave Obama a wide berth to contextualize Wright’s remarks and explain how he was probably “trying to be provocative.” Reverend Wright was “a child of the 60s,” Obama noted, “and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with
institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through.... He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”

In March 2008, almost a year after Kantor’s airbrushed pieces, ABC News broadcast the most incendiary of the clips from Wright’s sermons it had secured, including “No, no, no, not God bless America; God damn America!” This triggered a media frenzy, putting Obama in the harshest spotlight he would face in his campaign.

The
Times
duly reported on the controversy, and finally reported Wright’s inflammatory remarks about 9/11, although it didn’t directly quote “God damn America” in any news story and didn’t address Obama’s blatant lies about not knowing of Wright’s offensive statements. Even some Obama backers, such as Gerald Posner, were dubious: “If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post 9/11 comments, then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before.”

The “no-go” zone that the
Times
erected around Obama also encompassed “black liberation theology,” to which Reverend Wright was committed. On the Trinity United website, Wright cited James Cone, a professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, as the one who “systematized” this strain of Christianity. Cone had written, “If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.” In the
Times,
however, black liberation theology came off merely as something “different” from what whites were used to hearing.

According to Jodi Kantor’s first article in 2007, black liberation theology “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.” A longer analysis by Michael Powell in May 2008, headlined “Race and the Race: A Fiery Theology under Fire,” called Reverend Wright a “man of capacious learning and ego,” and “one of the foremost
adherents of this [black liberation] theology.” Powell quoted James Cone in a jocular mood, chuckling as he remarked, “You might say we took our Christianity from Martin and our emphasis on blackness from Malcolm.”

For his part, Obama would not give up Wright. But as pressure mounted, he and his campaign decided that Obama should make a major speech on race in America, a speech which some later saw as one of American political history’s great orations, while others dismissed it as a “subject-changing speech.” There was some criticism of the speech at the
New York Times.
Maureen Dowd saw through the lofty rhetoric and charged that it was pitched to superdelegates queasy about Obama’s spiritual guide, the virulent racial pride, the separatism, the deep suspicion of America and the white man—the very things that Obama’s “postracial” identity was supposed to transcend. Dowd, almost alone, underscored the fact that Obama had now reversed his previous statement that he had never heard any of Wright’s controversial remarks while he sat in the pews. But she also lent a note of tough-love support: “Leaders don’t need to be messiahs.”

Yet almost everything else the
Times
ran on the speech was celebratory, with the editorial, op-ed and news pages so harmonically converged that it was hard to tell the difference. There was no notice, let alone evaluation, of Obama’s equating his grandmother’s private prejudices with the systemized racial hatred that underlay Wright’s comments and worldview. Nor did anyone at the
Times
note the speech’s central contradiction, as Rich Lowry did, that “In the end, Obama made the case for the respectability of a man who is a hater—and did it, amazingly enough, in a speech devoted to ending divisiveness.”

Janny Scott’s starry-eyed “news analysis” called it “a speech whose frankness about race many historians said could be likened only to speeches by Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.” While it acknowledged the country’s troubled racial past, she wrote, “the speech was also hopeful, patriotic, quintessentially American—delivered against a blue backdrop and a phalanx of stars and stripes.” Scott also
quoted Obama supporters and longtime activist-intellectuals like John Hope Franklin and a tearful Julian Bond, but her analysis featured no one with a less triumphalist point of view.

Under unremitting pressure, although not from the
Times,
Obama eventually gave up on Wright and cut his ties to Trinity United Church of Christ. Wright made a series of appearances where his fury was noticeable and bizarrely expressed. In late April 2008, for instance, he gave a televised sit-down interview with Bill Moyers, a speech to the NAACP, and a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington. In his publicity trifecta, he claimed that attacks on him and Obama were really attacks on the black church. He refused to apologize for his “God damn America” remark and also refused to retract his claim that AIDS was an invention of the U.S. government, citing the Tuskegee experiment to argue that the government was “capable of anything.” Along the way, he also compared U.S. troops to the Roman legions who murdered Christ.

The
Times
barely covered the Moyers interview and the NAACP event, but finally, after the Press Club appearance, did a front-pager on the publicity spree. Yet the effect of the piece, written by the television reporter Alessandra Stanley and headlined “Not Speaking for Obama, Pastor Speaks for Himself, at Length,” was to trivialize the issues raised by the whole controversy. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous, but most of all, he was all over the place, performing a television triathlon of interview, lecture and live news conference that pushed Mr. Obama aside and placed himself front and center in the presidential election campaign,” Stanley wrote. “And he went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics.”

Meanwhile, the
Times’
coverage of the McCain campaign was riddled with unfair political characterizations and cheap shots, delving into the personal lives of the candidate and his wife, Cindy, with journalistic ethics worthy of the
National Enquirer.
Part of the problem was the depth of coverage, as well as the tone. A careful analysis by the TimesWatch website of the coverage from June
5 to July 5 found that of the 90 stories the
Times
did on Obama, 40 (44 percent) could be classified as positive portrayals, while only 13 (14 percent) were negative, for a positive-negative ratio of 3:1. The remaining 37 were described as neutral. During the same month, the
Times
published 57 stories on McCain, of which only 9 were positive (16 percent), compared with 24 negative (42 percent) and 24 neutral. This made for a positive-negative ratio of nearly 1:3, the opposite of Obama’s positive ink.

The Obamamania of the
Times
also surfaced in stories about political rallies along the campaign trail. Obama’s were portrayed as something like transcendental be-ins, with huge crowds, exhibiting political intelligence as well as diversity. By contrast, McCain’s rallies were depicted as being filled with “Weimar-like rage,” as Frank Rich described it, alluding to pre-Nazi Germany.

The
Times
went disproportionately hard on McCain’s campaign advertising as well. Ads that questioned Obama’s honesty were dismissed as either misleading or a breach of the civility that McCain had originally pledged. Ads that questioned the politically explosive subject of Obama’s association with the former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers were criticized as the hack work of right-wing zealots and an echo of the Swiftboat crew from 2004.