Black media in U.S. go all out for Obama
By Jim Rutenberg Published: July 27, 2008

ATLANTA: Warren Ballentine, one of black talk radio's new stars, was on a tear against Senator John McCain as he broadcast from the Greenbriar Mall here this month, blithely dismissing McCain's kind words about Senator Barack Obama at the recent NAACP national convention.

"He came out talking about how good of a race Barack Obama was running, and how proud he was of Barack," Ballentine said. "You know he went back home and said, 'I can't believe I spoke in front of all those Negroes today!'

"He was pandering to the crowd, talking about how he felt when Martin Luther King Jr. died," Ballentine went on. "However, he didn't vote for the holiday of Martin Luther King Jr."

Rush Limbaugh, meet your black liberal counterprogramming. Ballentine is one of the many African-American radio hosts and commentators who are aggressively advocating Obama's election on black-oriented radio stations daily.

Since Limbaugh, the most popular political talk radio host in the country, first flexed his tonsils two decades ago, Democrats have publicly worried about their lack of an answer to him and his imitators, who have proved so adept at motivating conservative Republicans to go to the polls, especially for President George W. Bush.

Now it is Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who has a harmonious chorus of broadcast supporters addressing a vital part of his coalition, feeding and reflecting the excitement blacks have for his candidacy in general. Obama is getting support from white liberal talk radio hosts as well, but the backing he is getting from black radio hosts could be especially helpful to his campaign's efforts to increase black turnout and raise historically low voter registration enough to change the math of presidential elections in contested areas and traditionally Republican states like Georgia.

"Urban stations can be in '08 what Rush Limbaugh delivered for conservatives a generation ago," said the Reverend Al Sharpton, who has a two-year-old radio program that is now syndicated on stations throughout the country, including in states like Georgia, Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina. "If you look at the political map of where our shows are, it matches the gap of unregistered voters."

Limbaugh and other conservative hosts generally support McCain, though perhaps with less enthusiasm than they displayed for the man he hopes to replace.

When it comes to criticism from black radio hosts like Ballentine, Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, "John McCain believes every person is entitled to their opinion, no matter how outrageous."

"But John McCain is an inclusive candidate," Bounds added, "and he will be the president of all Americans." (Ballentine was correct that McCain voted against the Martin Luther King holiday, in 1983, but McCain later expressed regret and supported the holiday in his home state.)

While debate may continue over whether Obama is drawing an inordinate share of attention from mainstream news and entertainment outlets, there is generally little pretense of balance in major black media outlets. More often than not, the Obama campaign is discussed as the home team.

Obama conducted frequent interviews with black radio personalities during the primary season, appearing on programs like "The Tom Joyner Morning Show," where his swing through the Middle East was referred to Friday as a "pre-victory tour"; the "Michael Baisden Show," where the host has joked that the savings from the gasoline tax suspension McCain supports would help him buy a pack of Now and Later candy.

Those three shows report having a combined audience of nearly 20 million, though industry analysts say exact numbers are hard to peg and programs generally exaggerate their audiences.

This month's Ebony magazine lists Obama first among the "25 Coolest Brothers of All Time," alongside Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. Caribbean stations play songs about him, like "Barack Obama" by Cocoa Tea and "Barack the Magnificent" by the calypso star Mighty Sparrow. "We spin them three, four times a day," said Sir Rockwell, the morning disc jockey in Delray Beach, Florida.

This year, attendees of the black-oriented TV network BET's annual awards program, including the musicians Alicia Keys and P. Diddy, turned it into an impromptu rally for the candidate ("Obama, y'all!" Keys shouted upon receiving an award before a television audience of nearly six million people).

The network is planning to show Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention live, but not McCain's. "This is an historic occasion, so that demands some special treatment from us," Debra Lee, the BET chairwoman, said of the Democratic convention. Her station's smaller rival, TV One, said it would not cover the Republican convention at all.

Within the black media, there have been questions about whether Obama is keeping his distance from them and their audiences to avoid being too identified by race. Some black radio hosts now complain that he is avoiding them at worst and taking them for granted at best as he courts white voters through more mainstream outlets.

McCain softens his criticism
Senator John McCain said he was not questioning Senator Barack Obama's patriotism when he declared that the Illinois senator would rather lose a war than lose an election, but rather was emphasizing that his Democratic opponent "doesn't understand what's at stake" in Iraq, The Associated Press reported from Washington.

In a transcript of an interview with ABC television broadcast Sunday, McCain attempted to soften the controversial accusation but did not retract it.

"Senator Obama doesn't understand. He doesn't understand what's at stake here. And he chose to take a political path that would have helped him get the nomination of his party." he said. "And if we'd done what Senator Obama wanted done, it would have been chaos, genocide, increased Iranian influence, perhaps Al Qaeda establishing a base again."

During the ABC interview McCain also declared that Iraq now was "a stable ally in the region" despite his opposition to Obama's having called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq within 16 months.