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By Jim Naureckas / Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
If there’s one person onto whom establishment media have projected their anxieties about race, class and democracy, it’s the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who died this week at the age of 84.
The civil rights icon, a protege of Martin Luther King and a brilliant community organizer, made history with his groundbreaking runs for the presidency in 1984 and 1988 (Extra!, 3–4/88). He put together what he aptly called a Rainbow Coalition: African Americans (a term he popularized), Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, workers of all colors, family farmers, immigrants, feminists, peace activists, environmentalists.
Notably, he was the first major national political figure to bring gays and lesbians—as LGBTQ folks were then called—into the tent as a community whose votes were valuable and whose rights were worth defending. He was the first mainstream presidential candidate to raise the issue of justice for Palestinians.
Advocating for these constituencies with an unabashedly left agenda—a brave move in Reaganite America—Jackson did well in both of his races for the Democratic nomination: He came in third with 3 million votes in 1984, and second in 1988 with 7 million. And he changed the rules of politics by offering an alternative to the top-down, big money-driven hegemony of the Democratic establishment: grassroots-funded, solidaric, genuinely populist.
And that kind of politics terrified an elite that thrives on keeping the 99 Percent divided and conquered. “Jesse Jackson scares the bejesus out of me,” then–New York Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger Sr. confided to FAIR’s Jeff Cohen in a private meeting in 1990 (Extra!, 3–4/90).
And this fear was palpable in corporate media coverage, from the right to what passed as the centrist “left,” from 1984 well into the 21st century. “I don’t want Jesse Jackson stirring up racial tensions and class warfare,’’ Bill O’Reilly declared on Fox News (11/8/00). (O’Reilly had a special animus against Jackson, with an endless slew of hit-job segments like “How Personal Are African Americans Taking the Moral Failures of Rev. Jesse Jackson?”—Fox News, 2/19/01.)
“Why hasn’t someone given the hook to Jesse Jackson, with his phony claims of African-American disenfranchisement?’’ Al Hunt, a TV liberal, wondered in the Wall Street Journal (11/16/00). NPR (2/23/88) compared him to a fortune cookie, which “you get whether you want it or not.” The Washington Post‘s Michael Kinsley (3/17/88) actually called Jackson the “Monster From the Black Lagoon.”
A figure so threatening had to be trivialized. In 1984, the San Diego Union Tribune (2/25/84) called him the “clowning, flamboyant, sometimes irreverent reverend who some say entered this race to prove that a minority candidate can run for president and be taken seriously.”
CBS‘s Dan Rather (7/13/92), with his talk of the “two Jesse Jacksons,” showed how corporate media needed to willfully misunderstand in order to neutralize him:
There’s Jesse the radical, who preaches rage and black separatism. That Jesse has always angered whites. And there’s Jesse the self-promoter, who preaches desegregation and compromise.
Of course, it was the fact that Jackson didn’t preach separatism—that he called for a broad coalition against the elite—that made him dangerous.
Jackson served as a symbol of everything the Democratic Party needed to turn its back on to merit a seat at the grownups’ table; putting Jackson in his place was a media-required right of passage for Democratic nominees, from Walter Mondale through Bill Clinton (Extra!, 9/92). As George Will (Washington Post, 7/20/88) put it during the 1988 Democratic National Convention:
Jackson’s overreaching gave Dukakis an opportunity to act presidential and he seized it, giving Jackson nothing but rhetoric as he cut Jackson, the would be co-quarterback, down to the subservient role of blocking back.
And the punditocracy was always looking for a Black leader to replace Jackson, someone who could symbolize racial equality without the challenge to social hierarchy that would be necessary to achieve it. “Jesse Jackson now must look around and see there are lots of other responsible office-holding black leaders, so he cannot wag the Democratic Party quite so much,” Will (This Week, 11/12/89) declared wishfully.
Douglas Wilder, an African-American governor of Virginia, was one such hopeful (Extra!, 4–5/92), whom Juan Williams (Washington Post Magazine, 6/8/91) hilariously deemed “arguably the most important Black American politician of the 20th century”:
It is not just that Wilder is an alternative to the best-known Black spokesman, Jesse Jackson: His success is a rebuke to Jackson’s 1980s political vision of Blacks as America’s victims.
Barack Obama, too, was initially embraced by corporate as an anti-Jackson (Extra!, 3–4/07): “Unlike…Jesse Jackson, Obama is part of a new generation of Black leaders who insist on being seen as more than representatives of their race,” Time (2/12/06) wrote.
Again, it was important to misunderstand Jesse Jackson in order to minimize the threat he posed to the powers that be. His key insight was that to represent any race, you need to represent all races.
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Jim Naureckas
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org, and has edited FAIR’s print publication Extra! since 1990. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader. He was an investigative reporter for In These Times and managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere. Born in Libertyville, Illinois, he has a poli sci degree from Stanford. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR’s program director.