Why Corporate Media Needed to Misrepresent Jesse Jackson
The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s kind of politics terrified an elite that thrives on keeping the 99 Percent divided and conquered.
Media Passed by Jesse Jackson
The media’s denial about potential disenfranchisement in Florida is cloaked in the denigration of Jesse Jackson. In lockstep media commentary, Jackson was depicted as a crazed black man on the corner, so nuts that cab drivers, the editors steering the news, had every justification to pass him up. On CNN (11/9/00), Jackson was “fomenting turbulence” […]
Hearing What They Want to Hear
Rev. Jesse Jackson’s recent comments about how blacks can take action against crime in their communities received an unusually favorable response from mainstream media outlets that are usually cool, if not hostile, toward the civil rights leader. But the selective emphasis of many press accounts distorted the content and context of Jackson’s remarks, revealing more […]
The Anti-Democratic Convention
It was fashionable to bemoan the networks’ lack of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democratic conventions. ABC‘s Peter Jennings (Washington Post, 7/12/92) said it was “a little sad” that the networks were passing up “a chance to present the democratic process in the purest sense.” Of course, modern stage-managed conventions are anything but a democratic process—and […]
A Short Walk on the Wilder Side
The pundits had a dream—the Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder would drive Jesse Jackson from the public stage. Doug Wilder, a self-described fiscal conservative who advocated budget cuts, supported capital punishment and bragged of his state’s “right to work” (anti-union) laws, was a moderate black who would, in the words of the 1992 Almanac of American […]
Fear & Loathing at the Democratic Convention
By the end of the Democratic Convention, media cliches about the campaign had outpaced peaches as Georgia’s leading export. Through dint of repetition, the most dubious claims became truisms. If there was a chorus that resounded in Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum even louder that Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” it was the media’s unanimous refrain about […]
