HE MEDIA'S DENIAL about potential disenfranchisment in Florida is cloaked in the denigration of Jesse Jackson. In lockstep media commentary, Jackson was depicted as a crazed black man on the corner, so nuts that cab drivers, the editors steering the news, had every justification to pass him up.
On CNN, Jackson was the ''rent-a-riot'' who was ''fomenting turbulence.'' In The Washington Post you could read, ''Why didn't someone prevail upon Jesse Jackson, as much in the dark as the rest of us, to stop exciting racial passions?'' In The Providence Journal, Jackson was one of the ''exhibitionist demagogues.'' A Wall Street Journal columnist asked, ''Why hasn't someone given the hook to Jesse Jackson, with his phony claims of African-American disenfranchisement?''
Even though Jackson, of former ''Hymietown'' fame, made some refreshing alliances with elderly Jewish voters who also felt disenfranchised in South Florida, a Columbus Dispatch columnist called Jackson one of the ''rent-a-ranters.'' George Will called Jackson the ''rented ranter.'' Bill O'Reilly of Fox News said, ''I don't want Jesse Jackson stirring up racial tensions and class warfare.'' The Dallas Morning News said Jackson attempted to ''incite'' people with ''inflammatory remarks.'' A Detroit News editorial writer called Jackson ''incendiary.''
Echoing the ''What Does Jesse Want?'' headlines of the 1980s when Jackson ran for president, many commentators asked, ''What was the point?'' of Jackson being in Florida. A member of Newsday's editorial board said, ''For those nitwits who believe public issues should be addressed by street mobs, Jesse Jackson's West Palm Beach rallies should be encouraging. If anybody can rouse the rabble, he can.''
In The Boston Globe, you could read that Jackson's efforts ''to rile up alleged victims of the butterfly ballot are an insult to those whose right to vote was truly violated in the past.''
The attempt by NBC (No Black Cab-riders) to pass up this black man was noteworthy because rebukes of Jackson were not followed up with evidence that Jackson was making up complaints of voter irregularities.
Quite to the contrary, while the opinion pages ripped into Jackson, an easy, unpopular lightning rod for many white Americans, the media did not unleash their full powers to find out if there really was disenfranchisement in Florida on a scale that could tip the presidential election from George W. Bush to the man Jackson supports, Democrat Al Gore.
Potential mistakes in overseas military ballots that would probably favor the Republican Bush were taken so seriously that Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman said that those ballots should get the ''benefit of the doubt.'' There have been no parallel concerns issued from the Bush camp over the claims that African-American voters suffered several types of indignities throughout the state.
The NAACP and civil rights workers held a hearing a week and a half ago on reports of discrimination and intimidation at the polls. But we have no idea if this was enough to affect the vote for president because the media did not follow it up.
A great story was being missed. Florida happened to be one of the most targeted states for get-out-the-vote campaigns by the Democrats and the NAACP. On one hand, the campaign was immensely successful. African-Americans, 13 percent of Florida's voting age population, made up 15 percent of the state's voters on Election Day. That was way up from 10 percent in 1996.
But civil rights workers who - unlike the media - have been doing the grunt work of taking testimony, are concerned that the energized black vote may have sparked a response from election officials in Florida to quietly deny any ''benefit of the doubt'' to any black voters who had a problem at the polls. One cannot forget that Florida, governed by Bush's brother Jeb, has waged an aggressive assault on affirmative action. Who is to say a state like this is not capable of dirty pool at the polls?
If as much of the media's resources went into following up on the NAACP's hearings as in the definition of a chad, we might already know the true story. Now, with two weeks gone, the truth, whatever it was, is being lost.
The media had a choice. It could have called Jackson's bluff with serious reporting. Instead, it wrote him off as a raving lunatic and sped past him to the next block to pick up stories more easy for white audiences to digest. The digestible story is that we have an election that is tied and we are not erupting like a Third World country. In leaving Jackson on the corner, the media may have missed the bloodless coup that may be occurring in Florida.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
