Presswatch / Howard's End
Cony, John
Howard's End by John Corry H ow does the press handle Louis Farrakhan? By explaining him away for one thing; by suspending its moral sense for another. The screwball leader of the Nation of Islam...
...Not a word did Time print to indicate that it ever crossed its collectivized journalism mind that black leaders who denounced the speech really might despise it...
...Who controls the media and Hollywood...
...It was clear that blacks and whites lived with opposing realities in America's most liberal city...
...In very general terms, two blacks agreed with a Jew, while two Jews agreed with a black...
...T he most provocative part of the coverage, though, was found in Time's revived Forum section: three black and three Jewish thinkers commented on Farrakhan and on the relationship between blacks and Jews...
...then it made its way around the world, eventually washing up in the Los Angeles Sentinel and apparently on the hospitable streets of New York as well...
...Who controls the Federal Reserve...
...He said this was because the white media and white establishment were hypocritical...
...It began when Khalid Abdul Muhammad, one of Farrakhan's aides, spoke at predominantly black Kean College in New Jersey...
...The press can deal with the first point, but becomes unsettled by the second...
...Politicalization, distortion, ethical junk...
...Jews...
...The editor of Tikkun, the liberal Jewish bimonthly, said in Time's Forum that he deplored black anti-Semitism, but that he just could not get "worked up" about it...
...Jews, Jews...
...The Times kept it off page John Corry is The American Spectator's regular Presswatch columnist and author of the new book, My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/Putnam's...
...This, of course, was healthy, and much of the commentary was wise, but there were also exquisite samples ofmumblemouthing...
...A corollary point now, harking back to the old Evil Empire, but still relevant today: Disinformation can be wonderfully effective...
...When the New York Times finally caught up with the Howard story, however, it reported that neither the Jew-baiting law student nor any of the other anti-Semitic speakers that night would be penalized...
...He wrote in his op-ed page column: Professionally, the [Time] article is worth noting simply as a warning to other magazines, newspapers and TV news programs: This is what can come out when "news stories" are allowed to cross over into editorialization by choice of words, angling and stacking...
...ABC's "World News Tonight" found that Nation of Islam (NOI) guards—"Their approach is to rule with respect"—had reduced serious crime in Baltimore and Chicago housing projects, and also made the projects "cleaner and quieter...
...The former executive editor of the New York Times knows a bad story when he sees one...
...This has an established history...
...Jews," most of the audience shouted back...
...Comel West, a professor of religion at Princeton, and also a new media favorite, offered insights such as, "We have become even more polarized, owing to our distrust of one another and our flagrant disregard for the transformative possibilities of high-quality public conversation...
...the mumble-mouthed acceptance had only just begun...
...The year before the Times-CBS poll, the press duly, if belatedly, noted that a black aide to Mayor Harold Washington of Chicago had asserted that Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS...
...A law student named Malik Zulu Shabazz addressed an audience there of about 1,000, at least half of them other students: "Who caught and killed Nat Turner...
...The speech was standard stuff, mostly about "blood-sucking Jews," but with references to the "cracker Pope" and "faggots...
...Am I really anti-Semitic...
...It was hard to know where, exactly, he stood...
...Mandatory multi-culturalism and the drearier outpourings of black-studies departments had had their effect...
...Lerner sounds like a silly man...
...Imagine, he said, what would have happened if a white university had held a hate night...
...There are some things it would rather not know...
...In 1986, two East German agents distributed a pseudo-scientific pamphlet at a conference of non-aligned nations in Zimbabwe...
...But the story also reflects something else: the sickeningly condescending attitude of so many whites, and some blacks too, toward black intelligence, independence, individualism and honor...
...2319 HILLALE OLLEGE The American Spectator April /May 1994 53...
...When the late Lee Atwater once tried to speak at Howard, he touched off a university crisis, and students protested en masse...
...We've never had a speech code," a spokeswoman for Howard said, "and we've never screened speakers for content...
...Cohen said the media "apply a -double standard when the bigots happen to be black...
...there were also excerpts from an interview correspondent Sylvester Monroe had with Farrakhan...
...The guards did not work out...
...Managing editor James R. Gaines defended the earlier Time piece in a full-page letter to readers...
...It would be better, apparently, if everyone ignored the anti-Semitic ranting...
...There is no need for a speech code at Howard or anyplace else where the rules are so thoroughly understood...
...A few years ago, for example, the New York Times and CBS News found in a joint poll that 60 percent of black New Yorkers either believed, or thought it possible, that "the Government deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods...
...he shouted to the crowd...
...Farrakhan followers often saythings like that, although usually they go unnoticed...
...Three months later, the accusation appeared on the front page of the Sunday Express in London...
...The Times also reported that two NOI guards at a nightclub in Inglewood, California, once murdered an unarmed customer...
...Lousy reporting reaffirmed the urge to excuse, patronize, and even romanticize Farrakhan and his bow-tied young soldiers...
...This resulted in something of a crossover...
...The media had a high old time with that, but insisted that allowances had to be made...
...You're not afraid to say it, are you...
...The screwball leader of the Nation of Islam has touched off a media seizure...
...Farrakhan and his organization...
...It said that AIDS had been created at Fort Detrick, Maryland, as an instrument of bacteriological warfare...
...William A. Henry 3d wrote e long cover story on the Nation of Islam (he liked the idea of NOI guards, too...
...that its prejudices and paranoia are shared by many black Americans is apparent, too...
...You have to admire that, don't you...
...CBS ignored the poll's findings on the "Evening News...
...This time, however, the Anti-Defamation League reprinted the text of the speech in an ad in the New York Times...
...More astonishing, the poll found that 29 percent of black New Yorkers either believed, or thought it possible, that AIDS had been "deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people...
...Commentary magazine opposed affirmative action...
...one, did not comment on it editorially, and ran no letters about it on the op-ed page...
...Rosenthal...
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...Media seizures come and go, and as a rule have no lasting effect, although the one over Farrakhan is different...
...Meanwhile, as the Times was beginning its series, Time magazine weighed in again, this time with massive coverage...
...Black paranoia is a painful topic, and it is remarked on in the mainstream media only when it cannot be ignored...
...That the movement is anti-Semitic and anti-white is apparent...
...Already among some Americans and in the press, there is a kind of mumble-mouthed acceptance of Mr...
...On the other hand, there was no doubt about where Michael Lerner stood...
...The Los Angeles Sentinel reported, for instance, that "the [AIDS] virus was made in an American military lab as a means to suppress blacks...
...And so on...
...In Menger, Mises, Hayek and more – the best-ever compilation of free market thought...
...The outcry would have become part of the national agenda, dominating the evening news broadcasts while leaving prominent columnists almost too shocked for words...
...The series included some ritual mumblemouthing—a Cambridge, Massachusetts, expert, for instance, who said the problem was white bigots, not black ones—but was distinguished more by its straight reporting, and it noted something ABC had overlooked: Housing managers in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles had hired NOI guards, and then decided not to renew their contracts...
...To do so, Time suggested, would be to try to enforce "racial correctness," and this, "it might be argued, is just another kind of bigotry...
...Why, yes, just imagine...
...Atwater was a white Republican who had worked for George Bush...
...T he recent furor over Louis Farrakhan resonates with some of the same sorry history...
...Nonetheless, some commentators did get it right, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen for one...
...Virtually unnoticed, however, were similar assertions on black talk shows and in black newspapers...
...The poll made both the Times and CBS uneasy...
...This seemed to imply they should expand their activities to other cities...
...The real crisis, he said, is our national selfishness...
...It goes: Well, maybe he is an anti-Semite, and that's not nice, but think about his good work among drug addicts and his speeches 52 The American Spectator April/May 1994 about black self-responsibility...
...Jews persecuted Palestinians...
...This was too much for A.M...
...and, most of all, because getting worked up over black anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the real crisis...
...Rosenthal was prescient...
...This forced the press to pay attention, but often in equivocal ways...
...Imagination fails only in trying to visualize what punishment would have been meted out to the racist white students...
...The banner headline said: "Blacks Intentionally Infected...
...Time said that "black leaders across the country" did not want to be forced into a "ritual of condemnation...
...he also knows about liberal-left cant...
...In his column he described a rally at Howard University, "federally funded and sometimes called the Harvard of traditional black colleges...
...Do I really want extermination of the Jewish people...
...Tonya Harding, the Bobbitts, the Menendez brothers, and Michael Jackson also touched off seizures, but they represented no one except themselves, while Farrakhan commands a movement...
...Cohen said it was "an event chillingly evocative of the sort the Nazis used to put on," and he criticized his own paper for burying the original news story about the Howard rally at the bottom of an inside page "with not a mention of Jew-baiting in either the headline or first paragraph...
...The same day, however, that ABC blessed the NOI guards, the Times began a three-part page-one series on Farrakhan and his works...
...Presumably this is true, although it may also be irrelevant...
...Of course the answer is no," Farrakhan declared...
...Time magazine ran a story that said it was improper to ask other black leaders to condemn either Farrakhan or his aide...
...Jews...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
