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Cynthia McKinney Confronts Corporate Media Malice in
Court
By Glen Ford, BAR
executive editor
In a suit filed in Georgia state
court, former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney charges the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and its
parent company, Cox Enterprises, a multi-national
corporation, with waging a libelous, defamatory and
malicious vendetta resulting in the loss of her
congressional seat, last year. The case is a window -
albeit a narrow, legal one - on the general corporate
campaign to penetrate and reshape Black politics in the
United States, to impose a docile class of
corporate-friendly Black "leaders." Media is key to
accomplishing the coup.
At the core of the suit is Cynthia
Tucker, the Black editor of the AJC's editorial page,
who has for years been incapable of uttering McKinney's
name without sneering. Tucker, the corporate owners'
Black pit bull, depicted McKinney's March, 2006,
encounter with a Capitol Hill policeman as an unprovoked
assault, pure and simple. "She slugged him with her
telephone," wrote Tucker, in a column that appeared
barely a week before McKinney faced challenger Hank
Johnson, the favorite of most whites and the corporate
establishment, in a Democratic primary runoff. Tucker
"tried to spin this incident into a felony," said
McKinney, in her suit. "This false and libelous
allegation is not supported by any witness or other
evidence." McKinney was never indicted for any crime,
and says the incident was the result of racial and
political harassment by the Capitol Police.
Tucker made McKinney's defeat a
priority project. "Tucker falsely attempted to attribute
what she interprets as anti-Semitic statements by
Cynthia McKinney's father by stating that ‘her father,
[is] a spokesman for the campaign,'" the suit states.
"Her father was not a spokesman for the campaign or for
her."
McKinney has long been targeted by
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
possibly the nation's most powerful lobby and attack dog
group, for her failure to tow the Israeli line in
Congress. Although McKinney's father, a former Atlanta
police officer and state lawmaker, has indeed made
indiscreet comments, no one has ever claimed Rep.
McKinney has uttered anything that could remotely be
deemed anti-Semitic. "The attempted attribution was
false, defamatory and libelous," states her legal brief.
McKinney labels as "malicious"
Tucker's repetitive assertions that "She suggested that
President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11
attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends
could profit from the ensuing war." That's not what
McKinney said, back in the Spring of 2002, and her
questioning of the conduct and motives of the Bush
regime have since proved prescient.
Cox Enterprises' Atlanta radio
outlet, WSB, piled on in racist frenzy. McKinney looks
like a "ghetto slut," shrieked talk show personality
Neal Boortz - a "slander," according to McKinney's suit.
Cox did nothing to rein in their
radio personality, and Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer
Prize for her columns, including the one that savaged
McKinney. A Cox spokesman called McKinney's suit
"preposterous." (For further details on the legal
action, see Atlanta Progressive News,
July 27.)
Newspaper as Serial Liar
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
worked in tandem with corporate money and AIPAC to first
unseat Cynthia McKinney in the 2002 Democratic primary
election. The paper, like its corporate siblings across
the nation, was anxious to prove that a political sea
change had occurred in Black America. Gone were the days
of "civil rights-style" rhetoric and confrontation - or
so the theory went. Middle class African Americans like
those in McKinney's district, centered in Dekalb County,
the second most affluent Black majority county in the
nation, were becoming more conservative, it was said.
According to the new paradigm, hatched in rightwing
think tanks and universally adopted by corporate media,
the Cynthia McKinneys of Black America are out of date,
passé, and no longer appealed to an upwardly mobile
class of African American voters. Dekalb County would
tell the tale.
While AIPAC and corporate donors
stuffed the coffers of Black challenger Denise Majette -
a former Republican and protégé of pro-Republican
Democratic Senator
Zell Miller - the Atlanta Journal Constitution
provided Majette with millions of dollars in free
publicity and attack-dog services. Cynthia Tucker
growled and sneered at the head of the local and
national corporate media pack, intent on making a fait
accompli of their own analysis, that Blacks were sliding
to the Right. Tens of thousands of white Republicans
prepared to cross over to vote as Democrats in the "open
primary," eager to put the uppity McKinney in her place.
The Designated Negro, Majette, outspent the McKinney by
40 percent.
Majette won. Corporate media
rejoiced, nationwide. As their local representative, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution claimed to conduct
a study that showed Majette had assembled a "biracial
coalition of voters" to win victory, ushering in a new
age of "centrist" Black politics. The prophecy had been
fulfilled.
Bruce Dixon, now Black Agenda
Report's managing editor, did
his own study of the election data and found that
Majette could not have won more than 19 percent of the
Black vote. The key to Majette's victory was an
abnormally high white turnout, 90 percent of which she
won. Majette was not the Great Black Centrist Hope - she
was the white candidate, and the Black
community had overwhelmingly supported McKinney. There
was no history-shaking "split" among Blacks in
relatively affluent Dekalb County; it was a fiction.
More than half a year after Dixon
proved that the Atlanta Journal Constitution's
"study" was bogus, the paper's own favorite political
scientist and quote-man, University of Georgia Prof.
Charles Bullock, declared Majette's "bi-racial
coalition" a myth. His research showed Majette garnered
no more than 17 percent of the Black vote. (See
Bruce Dixon,
June 12, 2003.) "What Majette needs to be doing is
getting out, courting in the Black community, trying to
broaden her coalition because she did so poorly in her
community," wrote Prof. Bullock.
What Majette did was get out of the
district, embarking on a Quixotic, hopeless quest for
Zell Miller's vacating Senate seat. With no time for
AIPAC, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and
corporate capital to vet a Designated Negro of their
own, Cynthia McKinney won her seat back in 2004.
Malice Aforethought
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
found defamatory manna from heaven in the last year
of McKinney's term, when a Capitol Hill policeman
confronted her as she attempted to do the people's work.
Editor Cynthia Tucker revved up her defamation machine,
recycling old lies and libels with the new. We commend
Cynthia McKinney for challenging Tucker and the Cox
corporate giant that is Tucker's only backbone, in
court, while fully understanding that the chances of
judicial success are slim, to say the least. If
deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media
could be effectively prosecuted in the United States,
the entire industry would be behind bars or bankrupted.
McKinney is putting their crimes against truth
on the record, and we salute her.
The assaults against McKinney's
character and seven-term career are but one skirmish in
a nationwide corporate offensive that was sketched out
by rightwing strategists in the mid-Nineties and fully
implemented in the early years of the Bush regime. For
the first time, corporate American would make a
concerted and coordinated effort to cleanse the African
American polity of what remained of the Black Freedom
Movement. The year 2002 was their D-Day for invasion of
Black politics. They came strapped with millions in
cash, and the supporting artillery of corporate media.
AIPAC acted as cavalry, ranging across the country and
terrorizing Black politicians into submission.
The first target was Newark, New
Jersey, where Hard Right Bradley Foundation Black
acolyte Cory Booker, a 31-year-old second term city
councilman and private school voucher advocate, raised
millions in his mayoral campaign and won endorsements
from every New York region corporate media outlet,
thanks to the skills of the Bradley-funded Manhattan
Institute. I am proud to say that my
research and writings, exposing him as a Trojan
Horse for the Right, forestalled Booker's ascension to
City Hall for four years. Booker was beaten, but
remained on the A-list of corporate-designated "new
Black leaders" until he finally won the mayor's office
in 2006.
The corporate juggernaut rolled on,
in 2002, vastly overspending (by 60 percent) and ousting
Black Alabama Congressman Earl Hilliard, who had
resisted the pro-Israel lobby and corporate demands. He
was replaced by the pliant but deviously skilled Artur
Davis. Then it was Cynthia McKinney's turn, later that
summer.
At the end of the 2002 offensive, the
corporate blitzkrieg had installed Artur Davis, Denise
Majette, and the obscure but thoroughly bought-out new
congressman from the Atlanta-area, David Scott, in the
Congressional Black Caucus. They joined Columbus,
Georgia's Sanford Bishop and the rapidly Right-rushing
Harold Ford, Jr. (TN) to form a corporate faction within
the Caucus, along with Maryland's Albert Wynn and shaky
members who trembled whenever the winds blew rightward.
The Congressional Black Caucus was finished as a
coherent political force on Capitol Hill, unable to
resist corporate capital as represented in its own
ranks.
The Black masses have not undergone
any political sea change; they have simply been
abandoned by their representatives, who have been
suborned or terrorized by money and concentrated media
and lobby power. Corporations have embraced "diversity"
as a weapon. About a decade ago, they realized that
their vast wealth empowered them to create an
alternative Black political structure, and that there
were plenty of Black opportunists eager to be recruited.
At this point, corporate victory is all but complete,
having neutered Black electoral and traditional
institutions in lightning speed.
The disaster puts in graphic relief
the failures of legal strategies, which are so narrow
that nine people on the Supreme Court can thwart the
will of 40 million African Americans, and the impotence
of conventional electoral strategies, which are negated
in Dekalb County, Georgia, and everywhere else in the
nation through sheer force of money.
There is no substitute for a mass
movement in opposition to the cages that capital erects
around us. Cynthia McKinney represents the overwhelming
majority of Black people in her district. They are
inspired by her courage and defiance of Power - and are
no different than African Americans, everywhere. The
corporate project uses its media to invent a fantasy
Black polity, and then deploys its media muscle and
money to make it so. Some of us believe the constantly
repeated lie. If it goes unchallenged long enough, it
becomes a received truth - and progressive politics,
with its base in Black America, will be over.
African Americans must press for
self-determination, not mitigated by money or the power
of white voter "democracy" - a democracy from Hell, as
we have known throughout our entire sojourn on this
continent. Only WE affirm ourselves, not corporate
media, not the millions that Barack Obama gathers from
his rich friends. But that means we must organize. It is
a lifelong project, as it was for our ancestors.
Glen Ford can be
contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com
Source:
Black Agenda
Report
posted 2 August 2007 * *
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posted 6 August
2008 |
