Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You—Ask What Your Press Agent Can Do for You
Barack Obama’s now infamous pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is milking his fifteen-minute flash of fame for all it’s worth. This weekend he spoke with Bill Moyers in a televised interview, delivered a televised sermon in Dallas, gave a televised speech to the NAACP, and this morning he’s speaking (you guessed it—televised!) to the National Press Club.
The Reverend understands the mass media marketplace at least as well as he understands racial division. Controversy sells. Give the media controversy, and you can expect significant media coverage. If that controversy is timely, so much the better, and if it fits into the ideological template of the journalistic pack, you’re as good as gold.
No issue generates as much controversy in the US as race. Liberals in the media love to shine a spotlight on racism, real or imagined, in order to bask in the afterglow of their moral superiority. Conservatives in the media love to shine a spotlight on reverse racism, real or imagined, in order to further their political agenda.
During his speech to the NAACP on Sunday, Reverend Wright invoked John Kennedy’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” and mocked JFK’s pronunciation of “ahsk.” The idea was to “ahsk” why it’s okay for JFK to pronounce a word so oddly, but not for black children to pronounce it, “aks.” That’s a valid, if utterly petty, point.
What should be clear to all is that Wright is no longer furthering a philosophy. He’s furthering his career; a book deal is surely in the works. Mocking a liberal icon like Kennedy is straight out of the playbook of Ann Coulter, who says outrageous things just to keep herself in the media spotlight. A similar dynamic drives Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to do outrageous things. (Paris’s favorite fashion accessory, her chihuahua Tinkerbell, actually had a book published. Ka-ching!)
Give the media something to cover, no matter how trivial, perverse, or cynically self-serving, and they will. Give the publishing industry a low-risk title, and they’ll publish it. With cable news, talk radio, and the Internet lowering editorial standards, and with the demands of a 24-hour news cycle, a critical institution in our society has been dragged down into the cultural gutter alongside Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.
Jeremiah Wright may have some important ideas to contribute to our national discourse. He holds two master’s degrees and a doctorate, and he served this country in the Marine Corps and the Navy. The cartoon version of the Reverend that’s being bandied about in the media doesn’t do him justice.
The fact that he’s so hard at work capitalizing on that cartoon doesn’t do the rest of us justice.
April 28, 2008 at 11:36 am
The corporate media’s campaign of misinformation has unfairly damaged Jeremiah Wright’s reputation as a man of God. Since the label the media has placed on him, you know the rascist unAmerican terrorist who is leading a cult, is not true, he has to come out and defend himself, especially with the influence on the Presidential election, which is what he is doing now by going to the media with the real story.
When we take something out of its context, the view given is distorted. The media has been on a campaign of distorting the view of Jeremiah Wright in order to influence the perception of Obama. This is not fair.
This is an example of how negligent the media holds the masses. They put up these sound bites that try to define a man’s life and the influence he has, which we know cannot be respected in a thirty-second clip. Talk about a hit-job.
You are right, though, that Jeremiah Wright’s current media blitz will help his career, but I think it will also drastically boost Obama’s, too. Once we understand Jeremiah Wright, we will see that he is a good man who was distorted by the media, and that Obama was able to undergo the media’s campaign of misinformation and remained loyal to his friend, while dismissing the quotes out of their correct context.
I encourage a view of Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers, which was the past Friday and can be seen for free on the PBS website.