Update (Ken Shepherd | May 9): Our good friend Mark Levin sent along an audio clip from his May 8 radio program wherein he addressed Jon Stewart's ludicrous comparison.You can access the audio here.

On Wednesday night’s edition of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, host Jon Stewart interviewed John McCain. As part of his ongoing outrage that the Reverend Wright issue would be raised against Barack Obama, Stewart sprung it on McCain that President Bush is his own Reverend Wright problem. He liked this “fascinating” analysis so much he repeated it, and suggested when it comes to Team Bush and al-Qaeda, “our policies are their Reverend Wright-- isn't he the guy they throw out there and inflame their base and get support? Don't you think he's actually been okay for al-Qaeda?” McCain answered by declaring the terrorists were a “transcendent evil” beyond one politician.

Stewart seemed to be citing an NBC poll (slightly wrongly) that found 32 percent of voters expressed concern about Obama’s relationship with Rev. Wright, but 43 percent were concerned by Sen. McCain’s relationship to President Bush. Stewart formulated his jokey question as if he were about to question McCain about being endorsed by harshly anti-Catholic minister John Hagee:

“It took much too long for major news media outlets to appreciate the importance of the Wright connection” to Barack Obama, Don Campbell, who spent “nearly two decades as a Washington reporter, editor and columnist for Gannett Newspapers and USA Today,” asserted in a Wednesday op-ed piece for USA Today. The headline over the piece by Campbell, now journalism lecturer at Emory University in Atlanta, asked: “Wright story: What took so long?” Only after “the most incendiary clips...landed on YouTube” were the news media, Campbell observed, “dragged into the controversy holding their noses, but by then Obama had the goal line in sight.”

Nonetheless, Campbell contended “Obama has been ill-served by a press corps that seemingly was mesmerized by the large, frenzied crowds who turn out to see the Democratic rock star.” Indeed, “crowds can be deceiving,” as Campbell recalled: “McGovern, nobody's idea of a rock star, attracted huge and exuberant crowds throughout the fall of 1972 -- on his way to losing 49 states to Richard Nixon.”

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

During Tuesday's coverage of the Democratic primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on MSNBC, co-anchor Keith Olbermann dismissed the importance of the finding that approximately half of primary voters considered Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright was an important factor in their decision, including some who apparently admired the way Obama reacted to the story. And, without naming Fox News, the MSNBC host seemed to accuse FNC of having "done nothing but broadcast this story since it first broke, with the wildest exaggerations and the broadest of interpretations possible." He further expressed relief that, in his view, Wright had not been a strong factor against Obama in the election: "It really does, thank goodness, prove, I think, some of the limitations of the media and of negative campaigning."

Below is a transcript of the relevant comments from Olbermann, which aired about 9:37 p.m. on Tuesday May 6 on MSNBC:

At this point before the Wednesday morning shows, Matt Drudge is highlighting an MSNBC clip where Tim Russert says we know the nominee will be Obama, and Hillary will be the last to realize it. But will the networks' post-election coverage identify the sour notes for Obama in the exit polls? AP reporter Alan Fram found the Jeremiah Wright connection continues to hurt Obama with white voters (and this is Democratic primary voters):

Obama, the Illinois senator battling to become the first black president, again failed to gain ground with a crucial voting bloc that has consistently eluded him — working-class whites. But he was piecing together a coalition that besides blacks included the young, first-time primary voters, the very liberal and college graduates, plus sizable minorities of whites....

Wright was a looming factor in the voting, with nearly half in each state saying he was important in choosing a candidate. Of that group, seven in 10 in Indiana and six in 10 in North Carolina backed Clinton.

Those saying Wright did not influence them heavily favored Obama. In North Carolina, Obama got more votes from people saying they discounted the Wright episode than Clinton got from those affected by it, while in Indiana the two groups were about equal in size.

There they go again. Once more, a liberal print journalist has seen racism behind conservative concerns about Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Yesterday, NewsBusters noted a blog post by a Chicago Tribune journalist which claims that Obama’s “supposed patriotism deficit” is because white Americans view African Americans in general as less patriotic.

In a May 5 Washington Post article appearing on page A2, “Department of Human Behavior” writer Shankar Vedantam asserted that it is not Revered Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary comments that have damaged Obama, it is his race, sex and public style. If Wright were a white female who wrote her outlandish ideas in a scholarly journal, Vedantam thinks the effects would not be the same.

On the syndicated, "The Chris Matthews Show," Kim Genardo, a political reporter for NBC Raleigh, North Carolina affilate WNCN, predicted that "smart, educated" North Carolina primary voters wouldn't be swayed by Jeremiah Wright but was unsure how "conservative, white, rural voters" would vote as she admitted she's not, "in touch with them."

The following exchange occurred on the May 4, edition of "The Chris Matthews Show":

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let's talk about North Carolina, Kim. It's where you work. He's had a big lead down there, Barack Obama. Has for weeks now.

KIM GENARDO, WNCN RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA: Absolutely.

MATTHEWS: It's narrowing, I hear. Tell me what you hear about that race as it's shaping up. Will it be an up or down on Jeremiah Wright, not Barack?

CNN’s John Roberts apparently took David Gergen’s advice from last week, and during his interview of Barack Obama on Monday’s "American Morning," declared out of the gate that he wasn’t going to ask the Democrat from Illinois about his former pastor. "I want to just stipulate at the beginning of this interview, we are declaring a Reverend Wright-free zone today. So, no questions about Reverend Wright. Our viewers want us to move on, so this morning we're going to move on. Is that okay with you?" Obama reacted favorably to this declaration. "Fair enough. That sounds just fine."

Rosie O'Donnell appeared on the May 5 "Today" show in its fourth hour, claiming that many have confused her "passion for rage" much in the same way as they've misunderstood Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Indeed, claimed the former "The View" co-host, Obama's former pastor "made sense to me." [Audio available here.]

O'Donnell also defended Wright's conspiracy theory view on AIDS, chalking that up to Wright's "genetic memory" of the Tuskegee Institute. O'Donnell incorrectly asserted the U.S. government infected the patients in that syphilis study.

Below is the transcript, taken down by NewsBusters resident O'Donnellogist Justin McCarthy (emphasis ours):

Here's something you don't see every day: a liberal, female editor of a leading liberal online magazine stating with cameras rolling that most press members "Hate, hate Hillary Clinton."

Yet, that's exactly what occurred Sunday morning when Salon's editor-in-chief Joan Walsh spoke some truths about the media's love affair with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, as well as their disdain for the former first lady (video embedded right).

Also surprising was Walsh's view of liberal assertions that the Rev. John Hagee is as big an issue for Sen. John McCain's candidacy as Rev. Jeremiah Wright is for Obama's.

But, before we get there, here were Walsh's comments about media bias during this campaign:

When Washington Post writer Sally Quinn came on the Charlie Rose show Wednesday night to discuss the Reverend Wright controversy, the accusations against whites flew wildly. Obama’s distancing from Wright was "so incredibly sad," and happened because "we are still a racist country," where "so many white Americans...have absolutely no idea what goes on inside black churches on a Sunday morning...and I think it brought out a lot of latent racism." She concluded the interview by insisting that whites "go to their white churches, and you wonder how they can call themselves Christians and still look at other people as though they are inferior."

Sally Quinn came on with Rev. Floyd Flake, a former Congressman from New York, who also discussed this with Rose the first time Wright became controversial. Quinn tried to say that Obama’s greater condemnation of Wright would help Obama, but it was tragic.

In an interesting way, I think it may have helped Obama, because I think that by [Wright] coming out the way he did, he allowed Obama to come out much more forcefully the way he did today. And he had to. He had absolutely no choice.

PBS talk show host Charlie Rose turned to the Reverend Wright issue on Wednesday night. Former New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh insisted the fuss over Wright comments like the government inventing AIDS for black genocide were a "red herring," that when you look at Wright’s old speeches and books, "there’s not much in there that’s hugely controversial," and even when he gets political, "he’s not making wildly controversial statements by and large." Sanneh also seemed to insist blacks couldn’t be racists.

Sanneh began by insisting that the Wright issue is being overblown, because there were radical things that Martin Luther King said that "would generate enormous controversy today." (Brent Bozell touched on that, the 1967 King speech at Riverside Church alleging both white and black American soldiers were brutalizing Vietnamese civilians.) But Rose was tough enough to respond: "But I want to know what that [King speech] was that’s equivalent to saying AIDS is a government conspiracy to kill black children?"

What is it about Hollywoodans that makes so many of them believe that any time political leaders they revere get caught in a scandal, it's because of some vast conspiracy?

While you ponder, consider how just days after "View" co-host Joy Behar suggested that Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's pastor "might be being paid by the Republicans," film director Spike Lee said, "It looks like [Rev. Jeremiah Wright's] being paid to keep talking."

I kid you not.

As reported by Britain's Guardian Thursday (emphasis added, h/t Deceiver via NBer bias-fighter, picture courtesy New York magazine):

Do my tax dollars really have to support the anti-American vitriol that comes out of the mouth of PBS's Bill Moyers every week?

Before you answer, consider that the host of "Bill Moyers Journal" followed up last week's much publicized sycophantic lovefest with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's America-hating pastor by going on a six minute defense of the junior senator from Illinois and the reverend this Friday which was filled with Democrat talking points.

Readers are warned to proceed with caution before either reviewing the highly-offensive transcript that follows, or clicking on the embedded video in the upper-right (h/t TVNewser):

John Kass, a right-leaning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, asked the obvious question in a Wednesday column:

Obama can't worry about Clinton's troubles. He's got a few of his own. And he'll be thinking what every one of us would be thinking, if we were running for president as Barack Obama: How the heck will "Saturday Night Live" ridicule me and Jeremiah Wright?

Kass had a few ideas of how SNL should do it:

Wright, Obama's ridiculously controversial longtime pastor, torpedoed the Obama campaign by releasing copious amounts of natural gas in separate speeches, one at an NAACP meeting in Detroit and the other before the National Press Club this week in Washington.

Though SNL writers haven't asked me, I'd suggest a skit called "The Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Clapping School For White Liberal Folks."

ABC’s Nightline featured yet another Cynthia McFadden trip with Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail Thursday, but it wasn’t all sympathetic questions about how hard it is to be a feminist pioneer. (There was one about how all the criticism must be hard on her mother.) Instead, on the trail in Indiana, McFadden pushed hard from the left on how Barack Obama thought her gas-tax holiday proposal was "phony" and "pandering," and how columnist Thomas Friedman of the New York Times thought it was "ridiculous," and how Iran thought her remarks about them were irresponsible. She also wondered if the Reverend Wright issue was "guilt by association...Does it worry you a little bit about the taint of association? Because, you know, you’ve been tarred by the same brush over the years."

McFadden began somewhat sympathetically, although it wasn’t good news, about how Indiana superdelegate Joe Andrew switched sides to Obama, despite President Clinton making him DNC chairman in the late 1990s. Then she switched to arguing against any gas-tax relief:

Though she leavened it with considerable levity, there's no escaping the bottom line: Mika Brzezinski sees Pat Buchanan as a nut. An affable one, to be sure. Even one with interesting things to say. But at heart, a nut. A "crazy uncle" fit for the same crate of cracked pots as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The prelude was Mika's reading of an excerpt from a brilliant essay by Charles Krauthammer in today's WaPo. Writing of Obama's recent attempt to definitively hurl Rev. Wright under the Greyhound, Krauthammer observed:

It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Obama could explain in all its complexity.

Turns out the Wright show was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Obama.

That prompted this exchange.

View video here.

After Jimmy Carter and Joy Behar, CNN’s Larry King had a prominent liberal guest on his show for the third night in a row on Wednesday, this time Michael Moore. After King played a clip from Bill O’Reilly’s interview of Hillary Clinton which concerned the issue of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Moore pulled out the "black rage" card, as well as the stereotypical rich white liberal guilt. "[Y]ou have to ask yourself, Larry, what's it like to be black in America? And what kind of rage would you feel? And if you did feel that rage, what kind of things would you say that, at times, would be outrageous, crazy even, because you've had to live through this for so long. And I do not believe, as a white guy, that I am in any position to judge a black man who has had to live through that." [audio clip here]

Moore appeared as a guest on "Larry King Live" for the entire hour of the program. His comments on Wright came twenty minutes into the program. Besides explaining away Wright’s many polarizing and outlandish statements, he also attacked Hillary Clinton for her actions in the campaign, as well as his more usual targets of George W. Bush and John McCain.