http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3890
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3897
by Seton Motley
Why did it http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2838 until Thursday March 13, 2008, for the nation to begin to learn about Barack Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright? The man whose Trinity United Church of Christ Obama has attended and generously funded for seventeen years? Whom he had publicly and repeatedly cited as his mentor and had named as a campaign advisor? Whom he chose to perform his wedding and baptize his two daughters?
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3923, until then, we were in the midst of Phase I — preventative medicine — of the media’s version of campaign health care for the Senator’s Presidential bid. Call it the Plan to Protect Obama (PPO).
The http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3895 story had been percolating beneath the surface for several years. It finally broke through to widespread dissemination last week. A picture is worth a thousand words — moving pictures with audio of Wright’s anti-American, paranoid rantings from the pulpit have inspired many more than that. These videos succeeded in doing what no series of Internet articles and blog blurbs had: they brought to mainstream attention the man who has been perhaps the key figure in the life and rise of the current Democratic frontrunner.
Having been forced to report upon the invective-addled Jeremiah Wright, the media shifted into PPO Phase II — triage. They minimized reporting of Wright’s videos and words in an effort to limit their impact on Obama’s campaign.
Friday March 14th’s NBC Nightly News allocated a mere 22 seconds to Obama’s condemnation of what fill-in anchor Ann Curry vaguely described as “inflammatory remarks that his long time pastor made about Hillary Clinton and the nation.” The newscast then went on to devote three entire minutes to a celebratory piece about how excited Obama’s childhood friends in Indonesia are about his candidacy.
That same day, MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell let slip her intent to control damage to Obama. Said O’Donnell: “Rush Limbaugh went nuts today on his program about this story” and then wondered “How do we get away from this?”
O’Donnell also sought to distance Obama from Wright and us from the story, saying “I don’t even know how these candidates can talk about policy because it seems like every day someone’s asking them to apologize for the comments of their supporters.”
Joining her in attempted damage control was CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “All this seems to have nothing to do with actual issues that the country is facing which these candidates should be talking about and we probably should be talking about.”
For the media, discussing the impact this hate-filled man has had on Obama’s perspective on things over the course of a quarter century is considered a distraction, but excoriating Republicans for appearing at Bob Jones University for an afternoon is somehow not.
On Tuesday the 18th Obama delivered a speech which he said would assuage all concerns regarding Wright. It barely addressed them, and in it he contradicted previous assertions that he had never been present for any of Wright’s controversial statements. Obama declined to disavow his Reverend before turning on a dime to deliver his views on racial issues in America.
But none of this even slowed the media’s damage control effort. In fact, they stepped it up. Overlooking Obama’s refusal to renounce Wright and his inconsistencies, they all fell in line behind his attempt to transform the speech from being about Wright to being about race.
That evening, ABC and CBS displayed “Race in America” on screen as the theme to their coverage. NBC went simply with “The Speech” but anchor Brian Williams described it as “a speech about race.” The gushing ensued.
ABC’s Charles Gibson: “Barack Obama delivers a major speech confronting the race issue head on, and says it’s time for America to do the same. Obama challenged Americans to confront the country’s racial divide.” He then hailed “an extraordinary speech.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=25659