Assassination Talk Shows Hillary’s True Colors

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Cover Story
May 29, 2008

When Hillary Clinton invoked the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as a justification for staying in the 2008 Democratic presidential race, she revealed how desperate she has become.

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it,” she said in an interview with the editorial board of the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D. Although some would chalk up her comment to fatigue or a lack of sleep, Clinton had similarly invoked the slain senator several times in recent months.

Talking assassination is serious business. Throughout the world and throughout history, the assassin’s bullet has made martyrs of positive change agents. The bullet has stopped leaders of democratic movements, and often those movements themselves, in their tracks. The names Gandhi, Biko, Lumumba, Allende, Rabin and Sadat are just several that come to mind.

And in the United States, a number of truth tellers and change agents have been assassinated, figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Medgar Evers. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had a policy of preventing the rise of a “Black messiah,” a matter of public record rather than urban legend or some wild-eyed conspiracy theory. Lovers of freedom are aware of the damage done to this nation because these individuals are no longer among us, taken from us before their time, before their work was completed, through violence and hatred.

To be a high-profile, charismatic leader of color in America is to find oneself under the gun, in a figurative and a literal sense. Sen. Obama and his family have received death threats, causing him to receive Secret Service protection earlier than any presidential candidate. Meanwhile Obama’s foot soldiers have experienced the full brunt of racial epithets, defamation, bomb threats and vandalism throughout the inhospitable underbelly of this nation. For Clinton to make light of this American reality - and to contemplate the assassination of her Democratic rival, an African American, as a political tactic - is to demonstrate a level of instability, insensitivity and cold-heartedness which belies, even betrays, her qualifications for the office which she seeks.

For the Clintons, it has been a long journey to the bottom of the barrel. It all started with Clinton’s “kitchen-sink” strategy to “mess up” her rival, Sen. Barack Obama, and render him unelectable.

The Clinton camp played the race card in a manner that would have made any Jim Crow politician blush. From the start, President Clinton did his part to stoke the fires of racial division in the South Carolina primary by comparing Obama to Jesse Jackson. At the same time, Sen. Clinton downplayed Martin Luther King’s role in the passage of civil rights legislation. This led to the revocation of the Clintons’ Black pass, and the exodus of Black voters to Obama. In an attempt to woo White voters, Sen. Clinton further disrespected African American voters by denouncing and scape-goating Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor. Meanwhile, as BlackCommentator.com reported in its April 20, 2008 special investigative report, Senator Hillary Clinton Must Explain the Praising of a Group of KKK Supporters, in the 1990s President Bill Clinton expressed his support for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a White supremacist organization that Hillary Clinton has yet to denounce. And Sen. Clinton won West Virginia and Kentucky by exploiting racism and appealing to what she referred to as “working, hard-working Americans, white Americans.”

But none of this could stop Obama. The Clinton camp tried to change the measure of success in the Democratic primaries, and manufactured all sorts of metrics, aside from the metric that really counts, the number of delegates, to define victory. Counting the votes in Michigan and Florida, states that were penalized by the Democrats for breaking party rules and holding early primaries, became a cause célèbre and civil rights issue for Clinton. This, despite her promise not to campaign in those states, a promise made when she was the frontrunner and thought she would win the nomination in February 2008.

It is not surprising to many observers that when all else failed, and there was no other way to catch up with Obama in the delegate count, Clinton’s strategy was to wait it out, hoping that something bad would happen to Obama to render him ineligible and otherwise unavailable for consideration for the presidency. Apparently, hoping for the demise of her opponent was part of the Clintonian calculus.

And Clinton’s latest assassination comments further reveal the contradictions regarding her candidacy. She cannot have it both ways. Hillary Clinton cannot claim to be a feminist whose candidacy has fallen victim to misogyny, yet engage in raw, unabashed appeals to white-skin solidarity, and endorse military aggression against innocent women and children in Iraq and Iran. Red meat, testosterone and hubris dressed in a pants suit do not equate to feminism.

Touting her civil rights record while waiting for her Black opponent to be slain, Clinton does nothing but debase the public discourse and show her true colors. It suggests an unhealthy desire for power at all costs, and at the very least, a sore loser with sour grapes over a poorly-run campaign.

Most of all, it suggests that Clinton has a lot on her mind these days, and no good can come out of what she has been thinking.

A Book Review of Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration, By Tara Herivel and Paul Wright

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 22, 2008

Incarceration is perhaps America’s leading method of social control. With 2.5 million in the nation’s jails and prisons - 7 million people when you include people on probation and parole - the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the world’s prisoners, the world’s largest prison population.

An important factor which is fuelling the alarming growth rate of America’s prisons is the profit motive. Making money, rather than deterring crime or promoting rehabilitation, is a guiding factor which determines why and how many prisons are built. In a book published by The New Press, Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration (2008, 352 pp.), editors Tara Herivel and Paul Wright present an anthology of essays which discuss the beneficiaries of the prison boom. Herviel, a public defense attorney, and Wright, the founder and editor of Prison Legal News, have assembled an impressive array of eighteen advocates, journalists, attorneys and prisoners for a comprehensive analysis of a $186 billion taxpayer-funded prison industry.

Punishment for profit is a sordid, unethical and immoral enterprise, and no other nation places more prisoners in the custody of private corporations than America. Consequently, this system produces winners and losers:

Primary winners include the politicians and prison corporations who benefit from the construction of new prisons, while Wall Street banks benefit from private prison funding schemes that lie outside of the public purview.

The private entities that administer and supply the prison industry attempt to evade public accountability.

Telephone companies benefit from an unregulated marketplace and charge exorbitant rates for prisoner calls, making it prohibitive for inmates to communicate with their families and thereby stifling the rehabilitation process.

Badly needed educational, rehabilitation and drug treatment programs are cut or eliminated in the prisons in order to realize cost savings.

Correctional officers’ unions advocate for more draconian sentencing that will fill prison cells and maintain their livelihoods. Meanwhile, as the book rightly argues, there is no relationship between crime and incarceration rates.

Often, prisoners - predominantly poor, of color, and unable to vote - are counted for census purposes in the mostly white and rural districts in which they are incarcerated. These prison towns receive more clout, more influence and more than their fair share of public resources in the process. Meanwhile, the inner city neighborhoods that produce these inmates suffer not only from a depletion of their population as a result of the exodus of men and women to the prisons, but a smaller share of government resources. This is similar to the three-fifths compromise of 1787, in which slave states were able to count three-fifths of their enslaved population, who could not vote, for purposes of determining distribution of taxes and representation in Congress. This compromise was codified in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the U.S. Constitution.

Depressed rural communities clamor to attract prisons to their town. Yet, they do not receive the benefits they believed the prison would create. Prison economies may stifle other forms of economic activity, and in any case, the true beneficiaries of are corporations, shareholders and executives. Besides, many industries are eager to use prison laborers, earning pennies a day, thereby displacing high-paying union jobs.

Prison growth, fuelled by Corporate America, has created the phenomenon of “one million dollar blocks.” In some inner city neighborhoods, so many residents of the same city block have been incarcerated that it costs up to $1 million each year to imprison them.

In an effort to shift the prohibitive cost of prisons away from taxpayers, some localities and states charge prisoners for their own incarceration, including room and board, healthcare, food and other necessities. Inmates, usually lacking resources and hailing from low socioeconomic backgrounds, are further punished through the imposition of court and administrative fees they cannot afford. Probation may be conditioned on the ability to pay restitution and fees, and failure to pay could result in a “go to jail card.” Thus, Neo-Dickensian debtors’ prisons are created.

And Prison, Inc. is particularly cruel towards the young and the ill. Private youth facilities, staffed with undereducated, untrained and underpaid staff in order to maximize corporate profit and executive pay, are rife with child abuse. Meanwhile, private prison healthcare providers, indifferent to human suffering, purposely deny medical care for the sake of the bottom line. The book provides accounts of particularly unconscionable acts of medical neglect and malpractice, in which babies are born and die in jailhouse toilets, and prisoners needlessly suffer and die from horrific infections.

Although an increasing number of Americans are going to prison, few Americans care to fully understand what actually happens in these institutions. Out of sight, out of mind, lock them up and throw away the key. Yet, the derivation of profit from the suffering and captivity of others is made more socially acceptable through conflicting images in the mass media. One set of image depicts and glorifies prisons as chic, fashionable, luxurious places where prisoners are coddled. Another image depicts prisons as horrible places, where male rape is viewed as a fitting, acceptable and even humorous form of punishment for violent lawbreakers.

Prison Profiteers provides the reader with a thoughtful, comprehensive and accessible analysis of the money trail behind the prison-industrial-complex. It is required reading for students of the criminal justice system, civil rights and civil liberties advocates, and those who desire a greater understanding of the underbelly of our nation’s prisons-for-profit system.

The Hard-Working White Americans

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 15, 2008

In desperation, those who cling to the old paradigm of gutter racial politics will do or say anything to get elected. We were told that this is the way the game is played, that we cannot nor should not expect anything more. If it works, it is fair game, and if you can’t take the heat, then stay out of the kitchen.

And certainly, the race card is a time-tested strategy for dividing people down the middle, ensuring that they are at each other’s throats, responding to fear rather than reason or self interest, and in tune with their reptilian brain. The clarion call that Whites are all in this together, against people of color - that they must hide their women from the Black boogeyman, protect their jobs from Mexican “illegals,” ensure that the unqualified affirmative action student does not steal their child’s seat in college, and defend their nation against the Yellow Peril, or Islamofascists, or the enemy du jour - has precipitated lynchings and riots, and won elections. Bereft of vision, of ideas, and often of charisma, these race-baiting politicians have stoked the fires of hate for generations, all to make a name for themselves and build their careers. Since the days of President Lyndon Johnson and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, race-baiting has been the crack pipe of the Republican Party.

In a recent USA Today interview, Senator Hillary Clinton, that failed and bitter presidential candidate, decided to go for broke. She said that when compared to her rival Senator Barack Obama, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” To prove her point, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There's a pattern emerging here,” Senator Clinton said. A pattern, indeed, but not the one the senator had in mind. While some would give Clinton the benefit of the doubt and attribute her statement to a misstep, or perhaps lack of sleep from answering all of those 3 A.M. calls, I am willing to give her more credit than that. As a skilled lawyer and a cold, calculating politician, she, like Bill, chooses her words carefully; she knows that which she speaks. Plus, she has a track record.

As BlackCommentator.com has reported in recent months, since Bill Clinton’s race-based mischief during the South Carolina primary, in which he attempted to marginalize Obama as the Black candidate with limited appeal, the Clintons have exhibited a disturbing pattern of race-baiting against Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton has offended millions of voters with her cynical appeal to White racial solidarity. Of course, she offended those members of the electorate who are not White, and presumably not hard-working Americans, including Latino Americans, the nation’s largest minority group, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans.

But Clinton also insulted a multitude of White Americans as well, those who have voted for her not out of a visceral sense of whiteness, nor out of a fear of a Black planet in the form of Obama, but out of what they perceived as a legitimate reason, be it nostalgia for the 1990s, Clinton’s positions on the issues, the possibility of electing the first woman president, etc.

Furthermore, she offended the multiracial, multiethnic and multigenerational coalition that voted for Obama and gave him numerous victories in the primaries, including many overwhelmingly White states throughout the nation’s heartland. These voters, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, are disenchanted with eight years of catastrophic Bush policies and understand what is at stake. These voters have the potential to fundamentally alter the electoral map. Apparently, they did not fall for raw racial pandering, and understood that a crass appeal to white skin solidarity should be relegated to the past. Clinton has insulted their intelligence in the process.

To be sure, there are millions of White Americans who will not vote for a person of color under any circumstances. So what? The reality is that we don’t need them and we don’t want them. We cannot concern ourselves with votes that never were and never will be available. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a key Clinton surrogate, was correct when he said that some Whites in his state would not vote for an African American, although his motives were questionable. In a state with entrenched racism - including hate groups and neo-Nazi activity in its middle “Alabama” region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - it is surprising that Obama trailed Clinton by a mere nine percentage points.

In the end, considering Clinton’s failure to surpass her party’s presumptive nominee in the primaries, the narrative of Obama as an unelectable Bantustan candidate who is unable to draw blue collar White votes rings hollow. Far more fascinating and relevant than Clinton’s edge among White voters in a limited number of contests is the nearly total evisceration of her Black support in only a few months. Early in the primary season, Senator Clinton enjoyed more African American support than Obama, when President Clinton was still the first Black president in the eyes of some. When the once-inevitable Hillary Clinton decided to become the Great White Hope in this presidential race, desperate in the face of the Obama steamroller, and her husband decided to assist her in sowing the seeds of division, things changed.

And indeed, the winds of change are upon us, and people are looking for a different way. We already know that the Clintons no longer own the Democratic Party that they so greatly influenced for two decades. Their “kitchen sink” strategy against Senator Barack Obama has tarnished their image and perhaps their legacy. Time will tell us if the Clintons’ cynical Southern Strategy against Obama will cost them their political future. One thing is certain: It is a long walk back to the Senate for one of the Clintons, and an even longer walk back to Harlem for the other.

Supreme Court's voter ID decision is a blow to democracy

By David A. Love
Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service
May 7, 2008

By upholding Indiana's voter ID law, the Supreme Court struck another blow to civil rights and equality in the United States.

In its 6-3 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the court ruled that the law, which requires Indiana voters to show photo identification at the polls, is constitutional.

But the law was devised with partisan motives in mind. The Republican-dominated legislature enacted it in 2005 against the wishes of Democrats and civil rights advocates who were concerned that it would deny equal access to the voting booth.

Why? Because the law places an unfair burden on the poor, minority groups, students, the disabled and the elderly, groups that are least likely to have proper ID.

Voter ID laws like Indiana's harken to the days of Jim Crow, when states required blacks to pay poll taxes and pass literacy tests, or answer questions as inane as "how many bubbles are in a bar of soap?" in order to vote.

In the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, said the burden the law imposes is minimal and even-handed, and that the law is justifiable since it aims to "protect the integrity and reliability of the electoral process itself." Also siding with the majority, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the Indiana law is "eminently reasonable.

The burden of acquiring, possessing and showing a free photo identification is simply not severe, because it does not `even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.'"

The dissenting justices, Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, concluded that the law "threatens to impose nontrivial burdens on the voting right of tens of thousands of the State's citizens." They added that a "significant percentage of those individuals are likely to be deterred from voting."

The dissenting opinion also took issue with Indiana's provisional ballot system. Voters who do not have an ID can cast a provisional ballot. The ballot becomes validated only if the person appears in court or before the county election board within 10 days of the election and can establish his or her identity. Someone without an ID would be required to repeat this process in every subsequent election. This is a burden for indigent voters in a state that lacks public transportation in many areas.

Ironically, the issue of voter fraud - the reason that some Republican lawmakers use to justify voter ID laws - is a red herring. There is very little evidence of voter fraud in the United States. Yet the Supreme Court cited voter fraud as the primary reason for upholding the Indiana law.

It is unfortunate that the highest court in the land has turned its back on voting rights for all Americans. Voting should be made easier, not harder. By giving the green light for states to enact such repressive laws, they are enabling those who would turn the clock back on civil rights in this country.

In an election year where millions of new voters are being brought into the democratic process, this should concern us all.

On the Criminalization of Black Motherhood

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 8, 2008

On this Mother’s Day, it is fitting that we take time to think of all of the mothers, disproportionately poor, and disproportionately of color, who are behind bars in the United States. Victims of a failed war on drugs, pawns in a for-profit prison scheme that requires more and more warm bodies, locked up, to boost the bottom line, Black women are the fastest growing demographic in America’s prisons. They are twice as likely as Latina women, and three times as likely as White women to be incarcerated.

Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2000, African American children (7.0%) were almost nine times as likely to have a parent in prison as White children (0.8%), while Latino children (2.6%) were three times as likely as white children to have a parent in prison.

And in a related matter, according to the Children’s Defense Fund at least 58 percent of children in foster care are children of color. Of this, Black children are 35 percent of children in foster care, even though they are only 16 percent of the population. Latino children make up 17 percent of foster children; 2 percent of the foster care population are American Indian/Native American children, although they represent only 1 percent of the general population, and 1 percent is Asian Pacific Islander.

In a 2002 opinion in Nicholson v. Scoppetta - which involved a class action suit by battered women against New York City’s unjust child welfare policies - federal district Judge Jack B. Weinstein characterized the excessive removal of children from their homes as “a form of slavery.” According to Northwestern University law professor Dorothy Roberts in a Colorlines magazine article, the role of racism in the child welfare system is a national disgrace: “Most white children who enter the system are permitted to stay with their families, avoiding the emotional damage and physical risks of foster care placement, while most black children are taken away from theirs. And once removed from their homes, black children remain in foster care longer, are moved more often, receive fewer services, and are less likely to be either returned home or adopted than any other children.”

In a society that seeks retribution, punishment and profit rather than rehabilitation and preservation of families as a desirable goal, women of color are penalized for their race, their gender, and even their motherhood. Women of color are more likely than White women to be monitored and supervised by the state, and more likely to experience state control over their bodies and their children. Call it a holdover from slavery, when Black women had no right to privacy, were violated at will, and could not make decisions regarding themselves, their bodies or their families.

Some states have enacted laws which criminalize drug-dependent expectant mothers and violate their civil liberties. Women’s eNews reported that eighteen states have laws that are racially discriminatory and potentially interfere with a woman's reproductive rights. Penalties may include arrest and termination of their parental rights. Driven by hysteria and misinformation regarding the so-called “crack baby” epidemic, these laws first became popular during the 1980s.

South Carolina was the first state to uphold the criminal conviction of a woman who has taken drugs while pregnant. In South Carolina v. Whitner (1997), that state’s highest court affirmed that child abuse laws apply to the behavior of a mother while the fetus is in her womb, and she may be prosecuted for harm to her viable fetus. In 1992, Cornelia Whitner was sentenced to eight years for unlawful child neglect— smoking crack cocaine during her pregnancy.

In 1989, a group of prosecutors in South Carolina, in cooperation with the police and public hospitals, decided to start punishing pregnant women who test positive for cocaine—most of them African American women who sought prenatal care. Proponents claimed the law was designed as a “family-friendly” measure to stop pregnant women from abusing drugs and to improve the health of the baby. Studies have shown the opposite: Such laws deter women from seeking prenatal care and the limited drug treatment that is available because they are afraid of going to jail.

Cocaine is by no means the leading cause of birth defects. Alcohol abuse is responsible for more birth defects. Tobacco is particularly damaging, as is poverty, malnutrition, stress and exposure to lead.

And the prosecution of pregnant women for drug use takes us down a slippery slope that leads to a logical conclusion of criminalizing alcohol and tobacco use.

But the issue is not a pregnant woman’s right to take drugs, but whether African Americans are accorded the same constitutional rights as everyone else. The issue is whether the state can intrude in the reproductive lives of women. Drugs already are illegal, and child abuse charges amount to piling on. Treatment for their disease, proper prenatal care and mental health services, rather than criminalization, will help make these mothers’ lives whole and productive. And as the Drug Policy Alliance has reported, “removing a child from his family may cause serious psychological damage - damage more serious than the harm intervention is supposed to prevent.”

Critics decry a police mentality that allows the state to monitor the behavior of parents, and all-too-readily separate parents from their children, rather than deal with systemic social ills. “Child welfare policy and practice in the United States can't be understood fully in isolation of other larger social phenomena in our country,” says NYU law professor Martin Guggenheim, author of What’s Wrong With Children’s Rights, in a PBS Frontline interview. “We are a country that proclaims a child-loving philosophy, which is belied by harsh statistics that suggest for an advanced, industrialized country, we do very poorly by and for our children. We have a shockingly high infant mortality rate; we have known environmental pollution conditions in many, many industrialized cities, in which children suffer from life-threatening asthma at shockingly high rates; we have inadequate housing; we have inadequate income assistance for many, many children in this country. Given our relative wealth, one could say objectively we are one of the poorest distributors of income to children in any advanced country. We have the highest rate of poverty among children in any advanced country.”

Malissa Ann Crawley, a mother of three healthy children, was one of the women prosecuted under the South Carolina law who petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. She was sentenced to five years for testing positive for cocaine during pregnancy. At Crawley’s hearing, the judge remarked: “I’m sick and tired of these girls having these bastard babies on crack cocaine and until they change the law, the law they gave me, it said I could put them in jail.”

The Drug Policy alliance also noted that the Whitner decision “gave law enforcement a green light to arrest and prosecute pregnant women for child abuse who suffered from drug and alcohol dependence. The decision also opened the doors for prosecuting women for homicide by child abuse, as in the case of South Carolina vs. Regina McKnight.”

Also commenting on the devastating effect of Whitner, National Advocates for Pregnant Women says that infant mortality in South Carolina increased for the first time in a decade. In addition, the state has experienced a 20 percent increase in abandoned babies, and there has been a dramatic decline in the number of women seeking drug treatment program services.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Whitner case on appeal. But in 2001, the nation’s highest court decided in Ferguson v. City of Charleston that a public hospital violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution by performing drug tests on women, and reporting the results of the tests to the police without the woman’s consent. Nevertheless, the criminalization of women struggling with addiction continues with the promulgation of unjust laws.

Punishing pregnant women for their addiction is unconscionable public policy. Locking up the mother, purportedly to save the baby, is primarily a violation against the Black mothers who are targeted, as well as their families and communities. But ultimately, it is an attack on us all.

Mainstream Media Serve Up Garbage As Legitimate News Coverage

By David A. Love
Published by BlackCommentator.com

May 1, 2008

Speaking of his fellow journalists, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was right when he told David Letterman that “Most of us in news are not smart enough to figure out what's going on. We may pretend that we're good enough to do that. But in fact, when we look you in the eye, in the camera, we're really just making it up.” I think he’s onto something.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Elizabeth Edwards, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and wife of former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, decried the state of the press and the problem of shallow media coverage of the issues:

Well, the rancor of the campaign was covered. The amount of money spent was covered. But in Pennsylvania, as in the rest of the country this political season, the information about the candidates’ priorities, policies and principles - information that voters will need to choose the next president - too often did not make the cut. After having spent more than a year on the campaign trail with my husband, John Edwards, I’m not surprised.

Why? Here’s my guess: The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

Meanwhile, conservative-turned-liberal commentator Arianna Huffington has criticized the “self-loathing” liberal media for placing “unabashed propagandists” on their payroll, deceptive individuals such as Karl Rove at Newsweek, Tony Snow at CNN, and Bill Kristol at the New York Times.

Perhaps a most fitting example of what is wrong with much of the mainstream media in general - and their coverage of this campaign season in particular - was the Pennsylvania Democratic debate. Hosted by ABC, it is more aptly called The Trial of Barack Obama. Despite the myriad crises facing this country, including recession, home foreclosures, health insurance, global warming, and a worldwide food shortage, much of the debate focused on patriotism, flag lapel pins, and angry Black preachers.

To add insult to injury, one of the debate moderators, George Stephanopoulos, a former advisor to Hillary Clinton’s husband when he was president, was a walking conflict of interest. And he appears to have received some of his questions from the right-wing Fox News. Fox host, Sean Hannity, suggested that Stephanopoulos ask Obama about his ties to William Ayers, a University of Illinois at Chicago professor who was a member of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. Stephanopoulos complied with Hannity’s recommendations, and his conduct was criticized even by much of the mainstream media, and the thousands of people who left comments on the ABC website. How many of us long for the days when the League of Women Voters sponsored these debates and focused on the issues that mattered, as opposed to today’s sensationalism, gossip and guilt by association?

This leads us to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The Wright issue was tailor-made for the mainstream press. Small portions of Wright’s “controversial” sermons, taken out of context, were played continuously over the airwaves. The mostly white-conservative-male punditocracy - political hacks and establishment tools who are culturally insensitive, wholly ignorant about the history of the Black church and the history of this nation, yet well-versed in race-baiting – ran with Dr. Wright. The 24-hour cycle of cable news, with its emphasis on the sound byte, and the need to entertain, divert attention and make a buck, demanded no less.

It was far easier for them to create the narrative of the wild-eyed, irrational Black radical than to present the truth: a scholar and theologian with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and a doctorate from United Theological Seminary, who is far more educated than those who would unfairly critique him; a man who served his country for six years in the Marines and in the Navy, and was part of the medical team that cared for President Lyndon Johnson; a man who has served his Chicago community for thirty-six years, and a man who has received death threats, and whose church has received bomb threats since his statements were first publicized.

Then finally, the media allowed Dr. Wright to tell his own story. Bill Moyers had a lengthy and thoughtful interview with Wright on PBS. CNN and C-SPAN aired, in its entirety, his April 27, 2008 speech before the Detroit branch of the NAACP, and his April 28 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. In those presentations, Wright gave the audience a lesson on the Black church and the legacy of racism in the United States. Agree with him or not, Dr. Wright has provided something which is sorely lacking in much of today’s mainstream news coverage: historical context, relevance, and an unfiltered voice speaking truth to power.

Now, I do not want to paint broad brush strokes here in my condemnation of the media. I have spent a number of years involved in various media organizations - mainstream, Black, Latino and alternative press, in print, online, on the radio and on television. And I have learned that there are countless journalists, capable, hard-working and experienced, who perform their job with integrity, attention to detail, and a sense of responsibility to the public. But it seems that the empty-headed talking heads, the fashion models and over-scripted, over-rehearsed cue card readers, increasingly are the norm. And fewer and fewer corporations are controlling what we see, hear and read. Unfortunately, style prevails over substance, and the real issues get lost in the process.

The public outcry over the Pennsylvania debate was a warning to the corporate media: If you hope to survive and regain credibility, you must change your ways.