Cynthia McKinney Confronts Corporate Media Malice in Court

by Glen Ford

www.dissidentvoice.org/, August 1, 2007

"McKinney is putting their crimes against truth on the record, and we salute her."

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.

"Cynthia Tucker is the Cox corporate owners' Black pit bull."

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.

"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."

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.

"Editor Cynthia Tucker revved up her defamation machine, recycling old lies and libels with the new."

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-'90s 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.

"Corporations have embraced "diversity" as a weapon."

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 is Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, where this article first appeared. He can be contacted at: Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com. Read other articles by Glen, or visit Glen's website.

*****

McKinney Rises Again

by Sam Muwakkil

In These Times magazine, May 2004

 
Cynthia McKinney's March 29 announcement that she would run for her old congressional seat gave a shot of electoral adrenalin to the body politic. McKinney represented Georgia's 4th Congressional District for five terms before being ousted in the controversial 2002 primary election. The prospect that genuine progressives like McKinney and soon-to-be U.S. Senator Barack Obama from Illinois will be members of the 109th Congress adds considerable cheer to this rather bleak political season.

McKinney became infamous for suggesting that members of the Bush administration might have known more about pre-9/11 intelligence than they previously admitted. That suggestion now seems a bit underwhelming in the wake of revelations from the 9/l1 hearings and the book Against All Enemies by Richard Clarke. At the time, however, McKinney's comments were seen as irresponsible and unpatriotic. She was excoriated and shunned, even within her own party.

McKinney's opponents in the far right skillfully used this controversy to build a national movement against her candidacy and-with the help of GOP voters in Georgia-she was defeated in the Democratic primary by a political neophyte, former state judge Denise Majette.

Majette's victory was secured by Republican voters who crossed political lines to vote in the Democratic primary: McKinney's opponents knew no Republican could win the general election in the Democratic district, so they openly promoted the crossover tactic to ensure her defeat. Crossover voting is allowed in Georgia's open primary system.

Following the election, State Rep. Tyrone Brooks of Atlanta introduced legislation to end cross-party voting. He argued it was unethical to have Republicans provide the margin of victory in a Democratic race.

David Bositis, senior analyst for the D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, agrees the system is unfair. The voting rights of AfricanAmericans in that district were harmed, he said, because post-election analysis made clear that McKinney was the overwhelming choice of the black electorate. Five voters in McKinney's district have filed a suit in U.S. District Court challenging the legality of the crossover vote under the Voting Rights Act.

Despite her defeat (perhaps because of it), McKinney, 49, has become even more popular among African-Americans and progressives in her district and beyond. Many now consider her a heroic figure, and revelations in the 9/11 hearings make her previous comments prophetic. The Green Party even mounted an attempt to draft her as its presidential candidate, an I offer McKinney reportedly was considering.

During her nine-year tenure, she served on a number of important committees. More important, she was an active member of the Congressional Black and Progressive caucuses, consistently speaking out against excessive military spending and inattention to domestic ills. She had a perfect labor and civil rights voting record, and during her last run she had endorsements of the National Political Women's Caucus, NOW-PAC, the League of Conservation Voters, Tikkun magazine and Jews for Peace, among others. Even Ralph Nader, who often argues that Democrats and Republicans represent a false dichotomy, speaks well of McKinney.

Her chances of regaining the district's congressional seat look so good they apparently have scared away its current occupant. The day after McKinney declared her candidacy, Rep. Denise Majette announced she would not seek reelection to run instead for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Zell Miller.

Several Democratic candidates have announced their candidacies for the 4th District post and others reportedly are on the verge of joining the fray. Whoever emerges as McKinney's strongest rival likely will attract considerable attention and resources. But her longstanding popularity and subsequent notoriety will be hard to beat.

And that's a good thing. According to a number of media sources (including the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Forward), much if not most of Majette's financial support was facilitated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which long opposed McKinney for her criticism of Israeli policy.

Many of those groups reportedly were caught off-guard when Majette announced she would not seek reelection. Consequently, "Jewish fundraisers are looking for ways to prevent former Rep. Cynthia McKinney from returning to Congress,' Matthew E. Berger wrote in the March 30 edition of JTA-Global News Service of the Jewish People.

Thankfully, those attempts are likely to fail this time. McKinney's and other progressives' voices are urgently needed in a Congress strangely mute while the Bush administration pursues imperial policies that sow the seeds of endless animosity.

*****

Equal Time

Bush must answer Sept. 11 questions

by Cynthia McKinney

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 4/15/02

The need for an investigation of the events surrounding Sept. 11 is as obvious as the need for an investigation of the Enron debacle. Certainly, if the American people deserve answers about what went wrong with Enron and why (and we do), then we deserve to know what went wrong on Sept. 11 and why.

Are we squandering our goodwill around the world with what many believe to be incoherent, warmongering policies that alienate our friends and antagonize our allies? How much of a role does our reliance on imported oil play in the military policies put forward by the Bush administration? And what role does the close relationship between the Bush administration and the oil and defense industries play, if any, in the policies being pursued by this administration?

We deserve to know what went wrong on Sept. 11 and why. After all, we hold thorough public inquiries into rail disasters, plane crashes and even natural disasters in order to understand what happened and to prevent them from happening again or minimizing the tragic effects when they do. Why, then, does the administration remain steadfast in its opposition to an investigation into the biggest terrorism attack upon our nation?

News reports from Der Spiegel to the London Observer, from the Los Angeles Times to MSNBC to CNN, indicate that many different warnings were received by the administration. In addition, it has even been reported that the United States government broke Osama bin Laden's secure communications before Sept. 11. Sadly, the United States government is being sued today by survivors of the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa because, from court reports, it appears clear that the United States had received warnings, but did little to secure and protect the staff at our embassies.

Did the same thing happen to us again? I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of Sept. 11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case. For example, it is known that President Bush's father, through the Carlyle Group, had -- at the time of the attacks -- joint business interests with the bin Laden family's construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which have soared since Sept. 11.

On the other hand, what is undeniable is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of Sept. 11. The Carlyle Group, DynCorp and Halliburton certainly stand out as companies close to this administration.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld maintained in a hearing before Congress that we can afford the new spending, even though the request for more defense spending is the highest increase in 20 years. All the American people are being asked to make sacrifices. Our young men and women in the military are being asked to risk their lives in our war against terrorism while our president's first act was to sign an executive order denying them high deployment overtime pay.

The American people are being asked to make sacrifices by bearing massive budget cuts in the social welfare of our country, in the areas of health care, Social Security and civil liberties for our enhanced military and security needs arising from the events of Sept. 11. It is imperative that they know fully why we make the sacrifices. If the secretary of defense tells us that his new military objectives must be to occupy foreign capital cities and overthrow regimes, then the American people must know why.

It should be easy for this administration to explain fully to the American people in a thorough and methodical way why we are being asked to make these sacrifices and if, indeed, these sacrifices will make us more secure. If the administration cannot articulate these answers to the American people, then the Congress must.

This is not a time for closed-door meetings and secrecy. America's credibility, both with the world and with her own people, rests upon securing credible answers to these questions. The world is teetering on the brink of conflicts while the administration's policies are vague, wavering and unclear.

Major financial conflicts of interest involving the president, the attorney general, the vice president and others in the administration have been and continue to be exposed. This is a time for leadership and judgment that is not compromised in any fashion. This is a time for transparency and a thorough investigation.

 
U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney is a Democrat representing Georgia's 4th Congressional District

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