They make Reverend Wright and Trinity United disappear

The Media, Lining it Up

And for their next trick, the media will stuff Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s liberalism back into his hat.

On Sunday, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman gave us a 1,152 word news-ish story entitled “Obama Addresses His Faith”, which was a glowingly open forum for Obama to deliver “a highly personal account of his spiritual journey” and in which he proffered “a promise that he will make ‘faith-based’ social service ‘a moral center of (his) administration.’”

It’s hard to read the word “faith” in the same sentence as the name “Barack Obama” without thinking of the racist, anti-American radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who for twenty years served as the Senator’s pastor, and (as Obama described him) his “spiritual advisor” and “mentor”, in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. It cannot be accidental that the Washington Post made no mention whatsoever of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United in a piece dedicated exclusively to the Senator’s religion.

It’s like handing someone a recipe for French fries and leaving off “potatoes”.

In Obama’s first book, Dreams of My Father, and (until public scrutiny focused on Wright) often on the campaign trail, Obama hailed Wright for amongst many other things being the man who brought him to Jesus Christ. Wright’s Trinity United remains to this day the only church of which Obama has ever been a member. Obama asked Wright to perform the marriage ceremony for him and his wife Michelle, and to baptize their two daughters.

In March, Wright retired from Trinity’s ministry and Obama resigned from its congregation as videos of Wright’s paranoid “sermons” finally began to come under public scrutiny. Wright’s rants included accusations that the federal government created AIDS to kill blacks, and that on 9-11 America’s “chickens (we)re coming home to roost”, i.e. that the nearly 3,000 murders that day were what our nation deserved.

Also on the Wright hit parade were references to the “U. S. of KKK-A.” and the lyric rearrangement of one of our alternate national anthems: “God bless America? No, no, no, God damn America”.

At the time, the reverent Wright-wing media minimized the coverage so as to diminish the damage done to Obama. What more could the press do for him than this? What would next emerge from up their sleeves after that neat trick?

Obama is quoted early in the Weisman piece saying, “In my own life, it's been a journey that began decades ago on the South Side of Chicago, when … I let Jesus Christ into my life. I learned that my sins could be redeemed and that if I placed my trust in Christ, that he could set me on the path to eternal life when I submitted myself to his will and I dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.”

Obama continued: “The challenges we face today … are not simply technical problems in search of a 10-point plan. They are moral problems, rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man. And so the values we believe in … cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws.”

See, you evangelical folk, the Post is saying, Obama is just another true believer, just like you. And he claims to want to implement fundamentally his fundamentalism once in the White House, just like you’ve always said you want someone to do.

Given the now very high-profile of Rev. Wright and Trinity United, it makes zero journalistic sense for the Post never to mention the Who or the Where of Obama’s spiritual awakening. It’s like handing someone a recipe for French fries and leaving off “potatoes”. But it makes perfect ideological sense, because in this instance the spuds are rotten.

More from this bit of “journalism”: “Evangelical Christian leaders have remained skeptical, however, that Obama's faith comports with their own, especially given his support for gay and abortion rights,” (emphasis added).

Well, duh. But it goes much further than merely where the Post takes it. These are not just political differences between Obama and evangelicals. These are two elemental Obama divergences from their religious tenets, that serve as but two further reminders of the VAST dissimilarities between the churches they attend and the black Liberation Theology house of hatred in which Rev. Wright raged and Sen. Obama sat for two decades.

Except they wouldn’t be reminded of any of this by the Post, for again Wright and Trinity United are never mentioned. In a story told to sell Sen. Obama as the next great religious politician, which for the media is a plus for him yet somehow simultaneously a negative for the current President, those facts do not help tow the line, so away they must go.

A very interesting omission by a newspaper that just a month ago fretted that Trinity United was becoming marginalized by all the negative national attention. Well, publicity problem solved.

This is only the beginning. Look for the liberal media to continue repeatedly reporting Obama-as-faithful-Christian stories, devoid of any references to the detestable Rev. Wright who Obama himself says made him so. All a part of an image fraudulently crafted by the press to maximize the Senate’s most liberal member’s mainstream credibility.

It's a kind of magic. I guess.

—Seton Motley is Director of Communications for the Media Research Center.