Presswatch/Loony Tunes
Corry, John
T he media consensus was this: A gulf now separates black and white America, and somehow it must be bridged. Usually one must be wary when so many columnists and commentators speak with one voice,...
...The Nation of Islam is famous for proselytizing inmates, and about a third of all blacks in the federal prison system are now Muslim...
...And you're going to have to live with me," Farrakhan had said at a news conference the day after the march...
...the Post seemed to be recycling some old quotes...
...That seemed like a criticism of Farrakhan, of course, but it wasn't...
...At one point in his two-anda-half-hour Washington speech, Farrakhan did a lengthy disquisition on the number 19: "When you have a 9, you have a womb that is pregnant, and when you have a 1 standing by the 19, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded...
...a youth in a floppy hat tied under his chin was the interlocutor...
...The verdict in the O.J...
...But speculation about the meaning of the march ended almost as quickly as it had begun...
...visiting celebrities stepped forth as end men...
...The Times lead, on page one, saidthat speakers used the conference "to attack white leaders, bash Christians and Jews, and ridicule fellow blacks...
...Simpson had murdered Nicole Brown Simpson, and anyway he did not care...
...Signs of the secret, apparently, lay in the height of the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, the Great Seal of the United States, and the 440 cycles of the A tone in music...
...After expressing the usual platitudes, no one knew quite what to say...
...The Post reported that Shabazz "did not say the weekend speeches were official elements of the Million Man March...
...In Farrakhan territory, self-hating people demean themselves...
...By contrast, the analysts, especially the academics, were much more respectful...
...The week before the Washington rally, "Nightline"'s Ted Koppel declared, even if reluctantly, that Farrakhan "may have to be called one of the most influential leaders in black America...
...the legacy condemned "patriarchy, homophobia and anti-Semitism...
...Then he read a poem, its words mostly unintelligible, and when he finished he got a standing ovation...
...An angry mob had not descended on Washington...
...The conference was demented...
...Black separatism is a hoax...
...Instead, there had been a gathering of generally amiable middle-class men, few of whom showed any passionate attachment to Farrakhan...
...On the eve of the rally, Time magazine concluded that "like it or not, for now at least, Farrakhan is leading the way...
...The men on the Mall voted on the speech with their feet...
...Hours after the rally, an anxious Larry King asked Farrakhan on CNN whether the Million Man March was really the Farrakhan march, and whether he would now be more conciliatory toward Jews...
...Farrakhan is also an ignoramus...
...Nonetheless, little of Farrakhan's gibberish found its way into the press...
...The Times reported that Malik Zulu Shabazz, the organizer, "said his conference was sanctioned by Mr...
...No one, however, was prepared to raise that possibility...
...The Times said that about 2,000 people paid $10 each to attend the climactic event of the conference, which was held at a public high school...
...People see what they want to see," Ted Koppel said, which was as sensible a summing up as any...
...He got an ovation, too...
...The New York Times ran excerpts John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...Stories about the conference appeared in the Washington Post and the Washington Times...
...Columnists and commentators agreed he was a demagogue, although they uniformly declined to note that he was also a nut, despite the great wealth of evidence...
...There were other speeches like that, not all of them so nasty, but every one of them, at least those heard and seen on C-Span, just as pointless...
...If white supremacy can be reduced to a minimum," West concluded, "then patriarchy, homophobia and anti-Semitism can be lessened in black America...
...Simpson case had led to exultation among blacks and disbelief among whites...
...Putnam's Sons...
...It pretends to offer a different reality, but instead it parodies the old one...
...Farrakhan replied with his customary evasiveness, and it would have been 52 The American Spectator December 1995 more informative if King had asked him to clarify his remarks about the Washington Monument...
...Nonetheless, the night after he spoke at the Mall, a series of disturbances began to break out in federal prisons...
...Never mind now that King worried more about matriarchy than he ever did about patriarchy...
...He had said he would join the Washington demonstration because he supported the legacy of Martin Luther King...
...It was reasonable to think there was some connection, even if tenuous, between Farrakhan's speech and the disturbances...
...Usually one must be wary when so many columnists and commentators speak with one voice, but this time their judgment made sense...
...Then City College of New York professor Leonard Jeffries praised Nasser, Mao, Mussadegh, Nkrumah, and Castro, mocked Clarence Thomas, and concluded with mysterious references to the Illuminati and secret societies...
...An independent team from Boston University, using grids and scanners, came up with a crowd estimate of around a million...
...The Post lead, on page 10, referred to "speeches sometimes laced with racially inflammatory rhetoric...
...The irony was that the black men on the Mall, his putative audience, had a better fix on this than all the media analysts...
...Coincidentally, the reporting was also an exercise in journalistic perspectives...
...Indeed, the new crowd estimate seemed to make that likelihood even greater...
...The Post estimated the crowd at 1,200, and did not mention the fee...
...Shortly afterwards, Louis Farrakhan presided over an enormous assembly of black men in Washington...
...m eanwhile, the Million Man March was scarcely over when speculation about its meaning began...
...This was accompanied by a controversy...
...To some, I am a nightmare...
...Sullen-looking guards from the Fruit of Islam murmured, "That's right," as he spoke...
...Farrakhan upholds an old stereotype, and if he did not exist, white racists might have had to invent him...
...The poet Amiri Baraka said that Colin Powell "already killed the brown people—he'll come for the black people next...
...The media thought it more appropriate to denounce Farrakhan for his anti-Semitism and homophobia than to ridicule him for his clownishness...
...West, and others like him—the academics really were dreadful—wanted to have it both ways: Farrakhan was voicing legitimate grievances, and even if he was a little soiled, white America was worse...
...In the tactful way the press handles these matters, some things are best left unsaid...
...Farrakhan said they were reminders of Egypt in the Eighteenth Dynasty...
...For the most part, Farrakhan was depicted as the twisted heir to Nat Turner, when he was really more like the Kingfish on "Amos 'n' Andy," posturing and prancing while he hatched gaudy schemes...
...They ignored the ugliness routinely displayed by Farrakhan's followers, some of whom showed up in Washington on the weekend before the Million Man March for a Black Holocaust Nationhood Conference...
...In his speech, Farrakhan had said it was 555 feet high, and that this was important because if you added a 1 you got 1555, "which was the year our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves...
...A Times news story characterized the speech as "complex...
...On "Crossfire," Comel West of Harvard talked about the "depths of black love speaking to depths of black suffering," and praised Farrakhan for showing "no venom...
...The holocaust conference was a caricature of a minstrel show...
...To others, I am a dream come true...
...Farraldian...
...The Times used fresh quotes (one speaker described the Twelve Apostles as "a lot of white faggot boys...
...Fear of appearing racist kept it out, and only those who stayed attentive to CNN or C-Span could get its full flavor...
...Anti-Semitism is a respectable target, but clownishness is not, and consequently Farrakhan was accorded more stature than he deserved: An anti-Semite has a vague monster status—Hitler was an anti-Semite—while a clown has no status at all...
...Then he had "spent his money on her no good ugly mother, no good ugly father, and her whoring sister...
...Indeed, at times it seemed that they had...
...The networks were absent, but C-Span was not, and the lunacy was put on the record, along with some startling invective...
...Earlier, West had performed a neat trick in an op-ed piece for the New York Times...
...Muhammad said he did not know if O.J...
...The press, however, patronized Farrakhan...
...It ignored his gaucheries, and pretended he had something to say...
...The National Park Service had estimated the crowd at the Mall at 400,000...
...Simpson, he said, had deserted his black wife, and "found some glorified whore...
...Earlier, the New York lawyer Alton Maddox had described him as the "conscience" of the black movement...
...from the speech, but ignored the goofiest parts...
...0 The American Spectator December 1995 53...
...Farrakhan insisted the figure was at least 1 million, and, as it turned out, he might have been right...
...In fact, Jamestown was not settled until 1607, and the first slaves did not arrive until 1619...
...The Washington Post seemed to be the only major news organization that paid attention to the gibberish, although it placed its story about it in the Style section, and treated it mostly for laughs...
...B oth stories were fair, and neither violated any journalistic canon, but the story in the Times—by Janet Naylor and Jeanne Dewey—suggested the spirit of the conference more accurately than the one in the Post...
...As Dan Rather reported, "The crowd began to diminish as Louis Farrakhan began to speak...
...Khallid Abdul Muhammad, a Farrakhan lieutenant, was the keynote speaker on the second night of the conference...
...The young men in army fatigues who lined up in back of the podium made up the company...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
