on Rev. Jeremiah Wright

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Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). He is coauthor, with David Peterson, of “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse),” Monthly Review (October 2007). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago.

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Beginning in March 2008 and extending through the last Democratic primaries of early June, the United States witnessed the most brazen demonization in its history of a person based on his race, his creed, and his ties to a presidential candidate. One major purpose behind these attacks was to use the demonized figure to discredit the politician. But participation in the attacks also fed the voracious, twenty-four-hour-a-day media appetite, and quickly took on a life of its own. When we look back at the ugly spectacle then taking place, the evidence suggests that, despite much optimism about narrowing racial divides and an emerging “post-racial” consciousness, something much closer to the opposite had gripped America.

Of course, we are referring to the U.S. political class and establishment media’s treatment of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Barack Obama. Contrasted with their handling of the Reverends John Hagee, Rod Parsley, and Pat Robertson and their links to John McCain, this episode provides an outstanding illustration of this country’s racism, chauvinism, and political biases.

Now retired from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago — the “‘best representation’ of black liberation theology,” as James Cone told the New Yorker1 — where he served as pastor for thirty-six years, Wright had known Obama for close to twenty of those years. Because of Obama’s membership in Wright’s congregation, Obama’s two coming-of-age books and numerous testaments about his relationship with Wright, and Wright’s early role in Obama’s presidential campaign, where until March 14, he was chairperson of its African-American Leadership Committee, both men had long anticipated the day when someone would use the big-city black preacher against the black candidate.2 “They’re going to associate your name with mine, and that could be detrimental,” Wright recounted in a PBS interview shortly after Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007. “[C]onservative bloggers and pundits have begun raising concerns about Wright’s Africentric theology and his liberal, some say radical, politics,” PBS added.3*

ABC’s Good Morning America first triggered the avalanche of Wright coverage on March 13, when it played four short video-clips of “controversial statements,” and framed them with the leading question: “Could the reverend become a liability?”4 The next day, without referring to a single word from Wright, Obama issued a blanket condemnation: “I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy.”5 The following Tuesday (March 18) in Philadelphia, Obama delivered his “A More Perfect Union” speech on race in America.6 “[T]he discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn,” he said, adding that he had “already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements...that have caused such controversy.” Obama even noted that Wright had a “profoundly distorted view of this country,” bending over backwards to repudiate anything that anybody finds offensive, no matter what Wright might have uttered, no matter how incisive. Noting that “This year, at least so far, the newsmaker from nowhere is Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright,” the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) likened Wright’s emergence “from obscurity to become a household word and an integral part of the media narrative” to the cases of Willie Horton (1988), Gennifer Flowers (1992), and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (2004).7 Although the PEJ failed to discuss what might link Wright to these three other cases, the “newsmaker from nowhere” had in fact become front-page news.

In one obvious sense, the transformation of Wright into an object of mass ridicule, and this object’s use, in turn, as an emotional “issue” to try to scare white Democratic primary voters away from Obama, into the arms of his rival, Hillary Clinton, belongs to a recurring strategy in U.S. presidential politics. As Kevin Phillips, a key adviser to Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign, explained the “Southern Strategy,” the more the “national Democratic Party [became] the Negro party throughout most of the South,” the more this fact “push[ed] whites into the alternative major party structure — that of the GOP.” Beginning with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision against “separate but equal” in Brown v. Board of Education, and carried across the South by the civil rights movement, the federal government’s pressures to desegregate southern schools, and culminating in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts of 1964–65 under Lyndon Johnson, Republican campaigns seized upon these institutional changes to reap the political backlash among white, traditionally Democratic voters, whose defections to Republican candidates would prove decisive in several elections going forward. The “Democratic identification with the Negro social and economic revolution precipitated [the Republican] party’s best gains,” Phillips explained. “Negro-Democratic mutual identification was a major source of Democratic loss...in many sections of the nation.”8

But the Wright case is also reminiscent of how the media have swarmed around other Democratic hopefuls the past three decades, when the scent of vulnerability hung in the air. These include Jesse Jackson Sr. in early 1984 over his use of the pejorative “Hymietown” for New York City; Gary Hart in May 1987 over an extramarital relation; Michael Dukakis in 1988 over Willie Horton, a black felon in the state of Massachusetts who, during a weekend furlough while Dukakis was governor, escaped to Maryland where he attacked a white couple in their home; Bill Clinton in 1992 (and throughout his entire presidency) over his extramarital relations; Al Gore in 1999–2000 over his alleged claim to have “invented the Internet”; Howard Dean in January 2004 over the fallout from what became labeled the “scream” speech following his third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses forcing him out of the primaries; and, last but not least, the success enjoyed in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group in sowing lies about John Kerry’s Vietnam War service record.9

Yet, the same media that leapt at the chance to repeat these stories paid very little attention to George Bush’s evasion of the Vietnam War draft and his preferential treatment and failure to meet his legal obligations while a member of the Texas Air National Guard.10 Meanwhile, in 2007–08, Obama has placated establishment critics on virtually every policy front imaginable, the candidate of “change we can believe in” has visited interest group after interest group to promise them that they needn’t fear any change in the way they’re familiar with doing business.11 Nevertheless, Obama’s race, his background, his enthusiastic, youthful, and less predictable constituency, and the occasional slivers of populism that creep into his campaign, make the establishment nervous, whereas Hillary Clinton and John McCain clearly posed no such threats. And like George Bush, John McCain is portrayed as an earthy, chummy, straightforward kind of guy — indeed, as a “maverick” whose associations with lobbyists, the military-industrial complex, and some of the genuinely reactionary forces of U.S. society do not elicit the kind of focused attention directed at Obama and most everything he touches or that touches him.12

Constructing the Black Preacher

By now, the sermons, lectures, and commentaries of Jeremiah Wright quoted, reproduced, and discussed by other sources, ranging from broadcast and cable television and radio, to print and, of course, weblogs and the Internet-based audio- and video-hosting platforms such as YouTube, have been so numerous that sheer scale alone makes it impossible to define where his allegedly “controversial” and “offensive” statements begin, and where they end. But the relative intensity of coverage tells part of the story. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, for the first 125 days of 2008 (January 1–May 4), the Wright-Obama relationship was the most frequently reported news item, receiving roughly 3.8-times more attention than did the second most frequently reported item, how the “superdelegates” were aligning in the primary process; it was covered 4.9-times as heavily as John McCain’s ties to lobbyists.13 Wright and his views also towered over the meager attention given to the views of Hagee, Parsley, and Robertson, and to their relationships with McCain. Media Matters for America reports that between February 27 and April 30 — the 27th having been the date on which Hagee endorsed McCain in San Antonio while McCain was campaigning with Parsley in Ohio — the New York Times and Washington Post “published more than 12 times as many articles” mentioning Wright and Obama as they did mentioning Hagee and McCain. In terms of editorials and op-eds, the ratio was even greater — more than 15 to 1.14

Similar patterns were true across the board. For the ninety-six-day period from February 27 through June 1, mentions of Wright’s name in conjunction with Obama’s outnumbered mentions of Hagee’s with McCain’s 10.5 times to 1; they also outnumbered mentions of Parsley’s with McCain’s 40.2 times to 1. (See table 1.) Remarkably, even the Reverend Louis Farrakhan’s name turned up in conjunction with Obama’s more frequently than did McCain’s with Hagee’s or Parsley’s — although Obama has had no connection with Farrakhan whatsoever. The Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that at the apex of its coverage (April 28–May 4), the Wright-Obama relationship “accounted for 42% of that week’s campaign stories,” while at its apex (May 19–25), the Hagee-McCain relationship “accounted for only 8%.”15 The next week (May 26–June 1), when Obama resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ after a video was circulated of the Catholic priest, Michael Pfleger, mocking Hillary Clinton during a guest sermon at the church, coverage of this “accounted for 13% of all the campaign stories.”16 Indeed, so obsessive and so recurring was the media’s focus on Jeremiah Wright, on Wright’s Trinity United, and on any person or topic that could be squeezed into this frame of reference and used to generate negative reporting and commentary about the black preacher and his ties to the black candidate, that even when the McCain campaign officially rejected the endorsements it had previously sought from Hagee and Parsley, nearly one-half as many more articles mentioned Obama-Wright than mentioned McCain together with Hagee or Parsley. (See table 2.) This reveals a deep bias of remarkable consistency.

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