The Media Ignores Toni Morrison’s Victory

The corporate media’s criticism of social media is understandable. Without social media, we couldn’t challenge their lies, distortions, and omissions. I began my morning on Wednesday, October 8^th with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where millionaire feminist Mika enthusiastically greeted the newly elected Philadelphia Mayor’s proposal to institute “Stop and Frisk.” Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that NYPD’s stop-and-frisk tactics violate the U.S. Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. (On Thursday morning, she welcomed Chris Matthews with open arms. Matthews was fired from MSNBC for sexual harassment.) The only regular on the show who isn’t hooked on a “Morning-in-America” fantasy where Ronald Reagan is always pitching a perfect pitch is Eddie Glaude, Jr.

By the time that “Morning Joe” was finished, my copy of the New York Times had arrived. Bret Stephens, who has a bug up his ass about Black people, had a column entitled “For America’s Jews, Every Day Must Be Oct. 8.”

In it, he made a list of those who were not friends of Jews. Predictably, Black Lives Matter led off the list. The corporate media invites those who disagree with its content to write a letter to the editor. I noticed that Donald Trump was not included in Stephen’s list of those who were not the friends of Jews. I wrote a letter to the NYT:

Mr. Stephens left out Donald Trump, who had dinner with two anti-Semites, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes. Mr. Trump said recently that ‘liberal Jews’ were destroying America. Does he believe that Black Lives Matter has more power than a man who might be a future president? Deceived by then-Attorney General Barr’s spin on the Mueller Report, Stephens said that Democrats should apologize to Trump.

It wasn’t printed. The higher-ups must approve of Stephens’ continued rants against Black people. A former regular contributor to NYT said that he was let go because he called Stephens a racist. Perhaps American Jews were not prepared for the upsurge of anti-Semitism because Stephens and Rabbi Michael Lerner lulled them into complacency by insisting that anti-Semitism was confined to Blacks like Minister Louis Farrakhan.*

When I want to analyze an international crisis in-depth, I turn to Pacifica Radio. However, Amy Goodman annoys me from time to time. She brought up the rape charge against Kobe Bryant on the day of his death without mentioning that his accuser lied and his prosecutor knew that she lied. Goodman’s analysis of the crisis in Gaza is balanced, while corporate media are merely repeating biased information handed to them by Bibi’s spokespersons. The most fawning to these handouts is MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera.

Goodman and The Nation magazine’s John Nichols discussed the election results. Commenting on the blow to Glenn Youngkin’s presidential ambitions, whose party lost both the Virginia House and Senate. They failed to mention that Youngkin, a Carlyle Group guy, who won the governorship by demagoguing Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Chuck Todd, appearing on MSNBC, made the same omission.

Youngkin had exploited a mother’s complaint, which said that the novel triggered unpleasant emotions in her son. He won the governorship and saw winning the House and Senate as a route to the White House. It turns out that the mother was a Trump operative. One of those who was on to the dirty trick was the online publication Slate on Oct. 31st, 2021:

The campaign ad for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin features an older blond woman, wringing her hands and telling a story about a book that her son had to read for school—one that was so upsetting, so explicit, that her ‘heart sunk’ to think of it. Internet sleuths didn’t have to look far to find out thatthe woman was Laura Murphy, a Fairfax County conservative activist; the son is Blake Murphy, who’s now 27 and works for the National Republican Congressional Committee; the traumatizing reading was done almost a decade ago; and the explicit book was Toni Morrison’s much-decorated masterpiece, Beloved.

So Toni, though the alternative and mainstream didn’t notice your victory, I did. You gave this bum’s political ambitions Ali’s phantom punch. Rest in Peace.

Note.

* “The Real Crisis is Selfishness,” by Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society. Monday, Feb. 28, 1994: “I don’t get so upset by Farrakhan and the other punks who run around the country getting famous by stirring up black anti-Semitism, even though I detest them, think their movements should be ostracized by the black community, and find obnoxious the lies they spew out.”

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