Critics called it racist. Supporters called it satire. But opinions aside, a local weekly newspaper’s photo spread last month comparing President Obama and the first lady to Sanford and Son spawned a proposal to sanction the Smithtown Messenger, reigniting the debate over the sanctity of legal notices—and putting Suffolk County’s race relations back in the national spotlight in the process.
The controversial photo array of presidential couples, published in the paper’s April 29 issue, started chronologically with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and ended with Barack and Michelle Obama, showing pictures before and after their time in the White House. The punch line was the “after” shot of the Obamas: an image of actors Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford and LaWanda Page as his sister-in-law, Aunt Esther. Esther has a scowl on her face and her fists raised to Sanford, a junk dealer, as their friction was a running joke in the 1970s sitcom.
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Long Island media experts and politicians are torn with regard to the fallout: those who want to pull Suffolk County’s legal ads from the newspaper—at a time when newspaper ad revenue is on the decline due to a variety of factors—believe the county is within its rights. While media professionals are generally opposed to the perceived government interference in the press, views vary on the significance of the showdown. Regardless, Suffolk County legislators are expected to approve the punitive proposal at their June 8 meeting.
That debate was sparked by the initial racial flare up. Phillip Sciarillo, the publisher of the newspaper, and three affiliates that also ran the feature, printed a retraction under the headline “Regret to Any Offense Taken” in the following weeks’ papers. “We can’t apologize enough,” he wrote. “We may not always agree with the President’s policies, but we respect the office that he holds.”
The apology, which added the paper “meant no disrespect,” did little to quell the anger still simmering from critics. Tracey Edwards, the NAACP’s Long Island regional director, describes the photo spread as “despicable and disrespectful.”
Unappeased, Suffolk County Legis. DuWayne Gregory (D-Amityville), the only African-American county lawmaker, went ahead with his proposal to make the Smithtown News the county’s “official newspaper”—in effect pulling lucrative legal notice advertisements from the Messenger.
At a May 10 news conference outside the Messenger’s headquarters, Suffolk County Legis. Ricardo Montano (D-Central Islip), the only Hispanic county lawmaker, defended the proposal from those who called it censorship. “They can publish anything they want, but as Suffolk County, we have the right to choose who we do business with.”
But just as pulling the ads will do little to improve racial tensions in a county where a white teenager was recently convicted of killing a Hispanic man as a hate crime, proposals that would end bickering over legal notices will also likely go nowhere. Yet even some of those who found the Messenger’s publication of the photos in poor taste came to the paper’s defense.
The government is required by New York State law to publish legal notices in newspapers and should not withhold taxpayer money to “coerce a free press or to otherwise demand that content conform to what government deems appropriate,” says John O’Connell, president of the Press Club of Long Island, the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).
The case “appears to be an attempt by government to regulate the content of a free press,” says O’Connell, who is also executive editor of Herald Community Newspapers, a group of South Shore Nassau County weeklies, noting that the organization found the photos offensive and that he does not speak for all of SPJ.
Jaci Clement, executive director of the Bethpage-based Fair Media Council, the local media watchdog, disagrees. “This isn’t a First Amendment issue,” she says. “The issue here is Long Island politicians thinking they own Long Island’s news media and the news media allowing that to happen. The best thing that could happen is the current method of legal notice advertising is thrown out the window so you don’t have weekly newspapers beholden to the politicians who decide which papers get that revenue.”
The current system is based on what many would consider a bygone era, in which two official county newspapers are chosen: one by the Republicans, one by the Democrats, with certain conditions. The concept is a throwback to the days when newspapers strived not for objectivity, but identified themselves as the official publication of a political party—although Sciarillo is not shy about his paper’s Republican slant.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy proposes doing away with legal newspaper listings entirely and suggests posting the ads for free on the Internet, but that would require state approval, which even he considers unlikely. Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano, who began his career in the newspaper industry, prefers keeping the ads in newspapers because not everyone has the Internet. Clement suggests getting rid of the “official newspaper” designation to “let the attorneys—not town clerk—place legals in any appropriate newspaper and let newspapers set competitive rates.”
For now, Gregory wants the legislature to give the ads to the Smithtown News (David Ambro, editor of that newspaper, declined to comment). The Messenger received $50,199.88 worth of legal ads from the county last year. The Town of Brookhaven already pulled their legal ads from the Messenger’s sister paper to the east, the Brookhaven Review.
Sciarillo says the news hurts, but it will not put him out of business.
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The debate over legal notices was preceded by an even more abstract discussion over whether the photo spread is racist or satire.
“It is simply shocking and outrageous that such a blatantly racist ad would run in any paper, much less an official paper of Suffolk County,” Hazel N. Dukes, president of the state NAACP conference, said in a statement. Edwards adds: “If this was intended as satire, it misses the mark.”
Sciarillo says when it first came across his desk, he thought it was “cute,” adding that he “cannot see what made it racial.” In an interview at his wood-paneled office, he suggests that comparing Obama to Sanford could be viewed as a positive.
“If you want to look deep at Sanford and Son, the program was basically about a happy family with a lot of jokes going on,” he says. “He tried to wheel and deal every way he can to try and make money,” which is what the president is trying to do now, Sciarillo says.
Gregory, the sponsor of the bill to pull ads, says there was nothing positive or funny about the photo spread at all, but rather characterized it as crossing the line.
“The president and Mrs. Obama have shown America and the world that they have nothing less than a stable, loving and caring marriage and to stoop to racially divisive stereotypes is just uncalled for,” he says.
Montano, a co-sponsor, invoked the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s oft-quoted ruling on the hard-to-define nature of pornography and applied it to racism: “I know it when I see it.”
Miles Kahn, a producer for The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, the popular satirical nightly newscast on Comedy Central, says the photo is hard to define as satire. “It’s not really a joke, it’s not really funny, it’s not really satirizing anything anybody knows about,” he says.
Most people interviewed for this story didn’t get the joke. Taken literally, the photo spread would suggest that Michelle Obama’s sister will pick a fight with Barack, which doesn’t work in real life because Michelle only has a brother. If the joke is the first couple will be feuding by the end of Barack’s presidency, that is a poor attempt at humor as well, in Kahn’s estimation.
If a likeminded feature ran in 1997 with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and they ended on The Honeymooners, “that would be satire, that’s making fun of the notion that they must be having a tough time behind closed doors,” he says. “I don’t understand what they’re satirizing here because the image of Obama and Michelle is that they have a great relationship.”
Sciarillo suggests if political cartoonists can make former President George W. Bush look like a monkey, Obama is fair game for satirizing as well. But Kahn says Bush’s monkey jokes were “a reference to his ears or maybe they’re making a direct reference to his perceived low intelligence.” Comparing the first African-American president to a monkey has much stronger racial overtones.
The New York Post provoked outrage last year when it ran a cartoon of two police officers standing over a chimpanzee they had just shot dead with the quotation, “I guess they’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
Suffolk County Legis. Majority Leader Jon Cooper (D-Lloyd Harbor), who was also the Long Island Campaign chair for Obama during the presidential campaign, says he supports Gregory’s bill—but only because the Republicans did not designate the Messenger as their countywide paper this year, the Democrats did it for them. Presiding Officer William Lindsay (D-Holbrook) is also supporting the legislation. Minority Leader Daniel Losquadro (R-Shoreham) did not return repeated calls for comment.
Cooper adds that the Obamas would take the high road if they saw the photo spread. They “would just let this sloff off their shoulders and they’d move on, so maybe we should take them as role models and try to move beyond this,” he says.
The White House declined to comment.
