Local and national media let racism slide
IN NATIONAL AMNESIA and local defiance, the media let racism off the hook this week.
The national example was the coverage of the death of right-wing Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. The obituaries dutifully recounted many of his blasphemies. The vitriolic reverend blamed 9/11 on atheists, pro-choice advocates, gay and lesbian people, and the American Civil Liberties Union. He blamed AIDS on homosexuals and called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist.
But there was virtually nothing on one of his greatest offenses. In the mid-1980s, he was an ambassador without portfolio in helping the Reagan administration coddle apartheid South Africa.
In both a LexisNexis search and a Dow Jones Factiva search, no newspaper in the top 20 of circulation in the United States mentioned Falwell and South Africa in its news obituaries. The highest-ranking newspaper was the Seattle Times, which said, "as a supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime in the 1980s, he visited the country and backed the white minority government."
That is a massive understatement.
After a 1985 speech in which South African President P.W. Botha refused to make major changes to apartheid, Falwell, present for the speech, called it "courageous." After a private meeting a few days later with Botha, Falwell said, "The country is making progress." This was a month after Botha refused to meet with the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, Bishop Desmond Tutu.
As Nelson Mandela remained behind bars, as police killed black children at funerals, as miners went on strike, and as the black majority remained without the vote, Falwell urged Christians in the United States to invest in South Africa's gold Krugerrands. He said of Tutu, "I think he's a phony, period, as far as representing the black people of South Africa." This was a perfect complement to President Reagan, who said in 1985 the "reformist administration" of South Africa "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country." Before the end of Reagan's presidency in 1988, 3,000 more people would be killed, mainly by the "reformist administration."
The fact that this godless connection between Falwell and Reagan escaped even the largest, 3,000-word obituaries speaks as much about the media's inability to fully confront its own psyche as it does anything about Falwell.
Ironically, as I wrote three years ago when Reagan died, not a single American newspaper reminded the reader that Tutu came to Washington in 1984 to declare that Reagan's policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa was "immoral, evil, and totally unchristian." Perhaps the engagement was so evil that even the media cannot stomach it.
Lest you think that this coddling is a thing of the past, you need look no further than Boston's airwaves. Talk-radio station WRKO-AM has invited Don Imus's racist sidekick Bernard McGuirk to be a co-host with former Massachusetts House speaker Tom Finneran on "Finneran's Forum."
McGuirk kicked off the banter about the Rutgers women's basketball team that got Imus kicked out of his nationally broadcast radio and television shows. Imus called the Rutgers black players "nappy-headed hos" after McGuirk called them "hard-core hos."
This was the final straw in a career of likening prominent African-Americans to the worst stereotypes of gorillas, cleaning ladies, and pimps.
It was summed up by the interview Mike Wallace did with Imus a decade ago. When Imus challenged Wallace to come up with an example of a racist incident by Imus, Wallace reminded him that he claimed in a car ride that "Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes." After at first denying using the n-word, Imus confessed that he did and he did not care what people thought about it.
What is Finneran trying to prove by having McGuirk on? To prove that his 2001 voter redistricting really was racist? Yesterday Finneran said on his show of McGuirk's comments, "That's history. That's in the rear view mirror. That's behind us."
If Finneran really believes that "hard-core hos," said just six weeks ago, is "history," then the next thing he and WRKO should see in the rear-view mirror are their advertisers waving goodbye.
In a couple cycles of commercials for "Finneran's Forum," prominent firms such as
Do these advertisers want to be associated with a man who Imus did not deny was "there to do nigger jokes?" Stay tuned.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. 
