Glen Ford, who over a 50-year profession was a number one voice amongst progressive Black journalists and a continuing scourge of the liberal insti
Glen Ford, who over a 50-year profession was a number one voice amongst progressive Black journalists and a continuing scourge of the liberal institution, particularly Black politicians like Barack Obama, died on July 28 in Manhattan. He was 71.
His daughter, Tonya Rutherford, mentioned the trigger was most cancers.
Initially as a radio information reporter in Augusta, Ga., and later as a tv and on-line correspondent, Mr. Ford supplied his viewers a progressive perspective throughout a big selection of points, together with welfare rights, international coverage and police misconduct.
He took explicit intention on the nexus of the mainstream information media and what he referred to as the Black “misleadership” class. He argued that right-wing company pursuits bestowed cash on sure centrist Black politicians, like Mr. Obama, whom he referred to as “not the lesser of evils, however the simpler evil”; these leaders, he argued, then drew the eye of corporate-run information organizations, within the course of marginalizing the pursuits of working-class Black individuals.
“He was an important path blazer when it comes to being an unbiased Black establishment within the media centered on fact telling,” the thinker Cornel West, an in depth good friend of Mr. Ford’s, mentioned in an interview. “He had the braveness to acknowledge the neglect, certainly the betrayal, of the Black political management that didn’t spotlight the plight of the Black poor.”
Mr. Ford criticized President Obama for taking cash from company pursuits and pursuing a coverage of fiscal austerity through the 2009 monetary disaster, whilst he spent billions rescuing banks.
“It was Obama, two weeks earlier than he even took the oath of workplace, who mentioned that entitlements would all be on the desk,” he mentioned in a 2012 debate with the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson. “This was at a interval through which the Republicans had been in disarray, couldn’t mount a problem to something.”
In the course of the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, Mr. Ford sided with the incumbent, Sharp James, in opposition to his challenger, Cory Booker — much less due to any love for Mr. James, who confronted repeated expenses of corruption, than out of an intense dislike for Mr. Booker, now a senator, who he believed had offered out to company pursuits.
“He’s completely cynical, careerist and mercenary,’‘ Mr. Ford mentioned of Mr. Booker in an interview with The New York Occasions. “They’re backing him to allow them to declare a Black elected official from a Black metropolis.”
The retailers the place Mr. Ford labored, a lot of which he ran and helped discovered, had been unbiased and run on a shoestring. However due to his power and management, they’d an outsize impression in progressive circles.
In 1977, when he was simply 27, he co-founded “America’s Black Discussion board,” the primary nationally syndicated Black information interview program on industrial TV. (It has since moved to the suitable.) It was seen on dozens of native stations, together with WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, bringing individuals who would in any other case not be heard from, together with welfare-rights activists and Communist Celebration leaders, into residing rooms across the nation.
He and three colleagues from the web site blackcommentator.com left in 2006 to discovered Black Agenda Report, a no-holds-barred information outlet centered on the problems that had lengthy animated Mr. Ford’s journalism.
“He was a socialist, however he was additionally somebody who had the wants of Black individuals foremost in his thoughts,” a type of colleagues, Margaret Kimberley, mentioned in an interview.
For all his ferocity, Mr. Ford additionally impressed esteem from a lot of his opponents, together with Dr. Dyson, a frequent sparring associate.
“I revered him tremendously, even once we disagreed,” Dr. Dyson mentioned in an interview. “He held up the loyal opposition.”
Glen Ford was born Glen Rutherford in Jersey Metropolis, N.J., on Nov. 5, 1949. His mother and father separated when he was younger, and he spent a lot of his childhood shuttling between his father, Rudy Rutherford, who relocated to his hometown, Columbus, Ga., and his mom, Shirley (Smith) Rutherford, who remained in New Jersey.
Alongside along with his daughter, he’s survived by his sister, Elena Rutherford. He lived in Plainfield, N.J.
Mr. Ford later mentioned that he had led a “bifurcated existence” as a baby, one which formed his profession as a progressive journalist. Along with the geographic divide, his mother and father got here from vastly totally different worlds: His mom was an Irish-American communist and civil rights activist, whereas his father, recognized by his on-air identify “the Deuce,” was a disc jockey who hobnobbed with singers like James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Aretha Franklin.
Glen dropped out of highschool when he was 17 to hitch the Military, the place he acquired his G.E.D. He turned a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne and served for 3 years stateside.
After leaving the Military in 1970, he returned to Georgia. He went to work at an Augusta radio station owned by James Brown, who inspired Mr. Rutherford to shorten his identify to Ford as a result of it could be simpler for listeners to recollect.
Mr. Ford at first wished to be a D.J., like his father. However the station supervisor assigned him to information, and gave him an inventory of the essential preachers to contact for remark each time a narrative broke. He recalled throwing the record within the trash, after which he went about growing ties with group leaders and activists round city, an strategy he would take repeatedly by means of his profession.
“I immersed myself in the actual politics, the grass-roots politics, of Augusta, Georgia,” he mentioned in a 2013 interview. “I made a decision I might discover out who the actual leaders had been and never these accommodationist preachers.”
Mr. Ford later labored as a radio reporter in Atlanta and Baltimore earlier than arriving in Washington, the place in 1974 he turned a correspondent and bureau chief for the Mutual Black Community, a syndicated information service.
As he had achieved in Georgia, he sidestepped authorities spokespeople and others voicing the official line in favor of progressive activists — not simply to achieve a unique perspective, but additionally to offer them a platform.
“We might direct the microphone to individuals who weren’t a part of the Democratic Celebration structure, however to these rising progressive forces rising out of actions and agitating on the native and nationwide degree, and deal with them as management,” he mentioned in 2013.
Along with America’s Black Discussion board, which he ran from 1977 to 1981, Mr. Ford based Black Agenda Reviews, in 1979, which produced quick radio segments on Black tradition for syndication (and was unrelated to Black Agenda Report, which got here later). In 1986 he created “Rap It Up,” a syndicated program devoted to hip-hop music.
In 2003, when he was nonetheless with blackcommentator.com, Mr. Ford observed that Mr. Obama, a rising star in Illinois politics, had his identify listed on the web site of the Democratic Management Council, a center-left group that Mr. Ford had accused of selling conservative positions.
He and his editor despatched an inventory of inquiries to Mr. Obama, then a state senator, to guage him primarily based on his positions on points together with single-payer well being care and the conflict in Iraq.
Mr. Ford mentioned in 2009 that Mr. Obama had failed the take a look at, however that he determined to inform his viewers he had handed as a result of “we didn’t wish to be seen because the proverbial crabs in a barrel,” flattening anybody who was beginning to climb.
“I’ve by no means regretted a political resolution as a lot as having handed Barack Obama when he ought to have failed,” he mentioned. “We’ve got by no means made that mistake once more.”