Jeremiah Wright

On Wednesday afternoon, New York Times political reporter Jodi Kantor hosted a live Facebook discussion on her new book on the Obamas and especially First Lady Michelle Obama. If this Facebook session is any indication, the book matches Kantor’s previous promotional coverage of the First Couple. On Facebook Kantor describes the First Lady as someone “with important ideas of her own about opportunity, access, equality, etc,” who “has redefined the role of first lady for successors...she's really raised the bar for ambitious initiatives.”

Revealingly, when asked about her latest scoops being allegedly used by Fox News and the Drudge Report as a “racial attack against the Obamas,” Kantor emphasized to her predominantly liberal audience how she broke the news about Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s ministry (in a bland story), and wrote a follow up “which I labored and labored over to make fair.” And it was “fair,” at least from the perspective of an Obama supporter.

On Saturday, NewsBusters reported that CNN in the six days after Politico's hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain was published did more stories on that subject than it did on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's connections to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, convicted real estate developer Tony Rezko, and America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright combined.

On Fox News Monday, Bill O'Reilly agreed with our analysis saying, "This is disturbing," as did guest Bernie Goldberg who explained, "The reason is fairly obvious and fairly simple. They like Barack Obama and his politics and they don't like Herman Cain and his politics" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters reported Monday, the broadcast network news outlets of ABC, CBS and NBC ran a total of 84 stories on the sexual harassment allegations against Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain in the week following Politico publishing its hit piece.

That is more coverage than they gave to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's connections to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, convicted real estate developer Tony Rezko, or America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright throughout the entire campaign.

As of Monday, the so-called news network MSNBC has already run more stories about Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's alleged sexual harassment than it did Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's ties to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, convicted real estate developer Tony Rezko, and America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright combined.

If you needed any more evidence of the political leaning of CNN, consider that much like Politico, it has in the last six days done at least 94 reports on the sexual harassment allegations involving Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain.

Substantially more shocking, according to LexisNexis, the supposedly most trusted name in news only did 77 total stories on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's ties to domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, convicted real estate developer Tony Rezko, and America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

As NewsBusters reported last week, New York Times outgoing executive editor Bill Keller believes presidential candidates should be questioned about their religious beliefs.

On Monday's "The O'Reilly Factor," media critic Bernie Goldberg marvelously said, "I wish that he and the New York Times was as concerned about religion and politics during the last campaign when it pertained to Barack Obama, who sat in a church with a hateful minister for 20 years" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The New York Times’s outgoing Executive Editor Bill Keller received some pushback on his recently posted column that demanded, in rather insulting fashion, that the media more aggressively question the religious views of the G.O.P. candidates.

Times Watch and others noted that his paper was hardly a model of journalistic assertiveness during the spring of 2008, when Barack Obama endured political controversy over the racially inflammatory and conspiracy-minded Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's minister at Trinity United Church of Christ. Keller responded via Twitter on Friday morning:

Yes, Dems should be asked about their faith (and influences) too. We were late to Rev. Wright in '08, but we got there, and did it well.

Mild-mannered Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty may have his own Rev. Wright, Salon.com's Justin Elliott sensationally alerted readers of the War Room blog Thursday morning.

The reason, Elliott argues: the former Minnesota governor's preacher believes in manmade global warming and wants a liberal immigration reform policy enacted into law:

The pastor who preached the Easter sermon that Barack Obama heard this past Sunday is not another Jeremiah Wright, Time's Amy Sullivan insists in an April 29 blog "Swampland" blog post entitled "Conservatives Go After Another Obama Pastor."

Sullivan was responding to the complaints of conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who highlighted some controversial remarks Smith made to a college audience last year:

After spending much of his week accusing Rush Limbaugh of racism, Ed Schultz on Friday made the same absurd claim about former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Following in the footsteps of others on his network as well as the liberal blogosphere, the MSNBCer said it was racist for Palin to refer to comments Michelle Obama made in 2008 about never having been proud of her country before her husband started winning primaries.

It was also racist of Palin to mention in her book the Obamas' connection to Rev. Jeremiah Wright (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The editors of the mainstream media must think we all have very short memories.

Their latest schtick is to smear conservative talk show host Glenn Beck as a creepy Mormon who has no business influencing evangelicals.

Aside from the disgusting hypocrisy of Mormon-baiting one minute and then bashing Islamophobia the next, these news outlets are also hoping you've forgotten about their recent smearing of evangelicals like Sarah Palin, John Hagee, and James Dobson.

But hey, they shouldn't be held accountable for their own religious bigotry on display in 2008. That was a whole two years ago, and anyway they had a Democrat messiah to protect.

For a flashback at how low the media stooped then, let's review an editorial cartoon shamelessly bashing Pentecostalism that appeared on the Washington Post's website on September 18, 2008:

The Washington Post found it newsworthy that "Beck challenges Obama's religious beliefs after rally in D.C.," but emphasized how Glenn Beck's views could cause a backlash, and papered over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's wild-eyed radical sermons as merely focusing on "the importance of empowering the oppressed." In the story on page A-4, Post reporter Felicia Sonmez made no mention of the president's avoidance of church services while she repeated the White House assertion that he's a "committed Christian." Here's the summation: 

During an interview on "Fox News Sunday," which was filmed after Saturday's rally, Beck claimed that Obama "is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim."

"People aren't recognizing his version of Christianity," Beck added.

Managing Editor's Note:  NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell today reprimanded members of the press in light of the recently exposed e-mails from the now-defunct JournoList that show a blatant, deliberate campaign to smear conservatives. That statement is published below. Click here for more background on JournoList.

The revelation of these e-mails simply proves that we have been right all along.  The liberal media have no interest in being fair or unbiased.  In fact, they are deliberately violating any sense of journalistic ethics.

There is no excuse – none- for the attitudes and lack of professionalism these so-called journalists displayed not only in these e-mails but in their reporting.  Any member of the media that was privy to these Journolist emails, and remained silent, is just as much to blame as the folks that crafted these e-mails. Their silence indicts them. 

We said in 2008 that the media were making excuses for Jeremiah Wright and now we have the proof. Just today we learned from the Daily Caller that these people went so far as to say that Rush Limbaugh ‘deserves’ their hate.  Sadly, I am not surprised, as this is what we have been exposing year after year about the media.  And it’s exactly why Americans refuse to trust them.

In the wake of Tuesday's revelations concerning liberal media members trying to bury the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story in the spring of 2008, one has to wonder how many mainstream organizations played a hand.

On May 5 of that year, at the beginning of an interview with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama, CNN's John Roberts said (video available here courtesy Ed Driscoll, relevant section at 3:43):

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.

As NewsBusters noted at the time, this came eight days after CNN personalities David Gergen, Tony Harris, and Roland Martin had a discussion about why the media should stop talking about Wright (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The Daily Caller has another scoop on the leftist JournoList e-mails today, recalling when liberal scribes all wanted the Jeremiah Wright story to be dead and buried in the spring of 2008. Jonathan Strong explained "Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."

Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”...The tough questioning from ABC left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

President Obama's former spiritual advisor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, gave a seminar at the University of Chicago last week in which he made numerous anti-Semitic remarks while once again attacking white people.

According to the New York Post, during the five-day course that cost up to $1,000, Wright claimed "whites and Jews are controlling the flow of worldwide information and oppressing blacks in Israel and America."

"White folk done took this country," Wright said. "You're in their home, and they're gonna let you know it." 

Despite the astonishingly racist comments during this week-long event, as well as his former connection to the current President of the United States, not one media outlet besides the Post reported what transpired at the Chicago Theological Seminary on the university campus. Not one!

For those that can stand it, here are some more disgraceful things uttered by the man our President worshiped with for twenty years (h/t Weasel Zippers):

UPDATE - 6/9, 5:45 PM | Lachlan Markay: One of CNN's primary sources for this piece has endorsed the notion that "Rev. Wright's anger about the domestic and foreign policies of the USA are well rooted – and documented – in the current reality of the USA." Details below the jump.

The excuses keep rolling in to explain why President Obama is seemingly detached from the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Wednesday, CNN.com reached a new low by blatantly playing the race card: President Obama is afraid to look angry in public because white people historically haven't liked angry black men.

This conclusion was offered by four supposed experts (all of whom were sympathetic to Obama), with no one else mentioned to provide any ounce of skepticism.

Apparently CNN's logic goes something like this: Obama grew up being afraid of offending white people, so he developed a natural aversion to public displays of emotion, which means his cool response to the oil spill right now is the final product of white bigotry.

Writer John Blake got straight to the point with his headline "Why Obama Doesn't Dare Become the Angry Black Man." It was all downhill from there (h/t NBer Mr. Shy):

The April 19 Newsweek cover that's shamelessly selling the "remarkable" tale of our economic recovery also promises a story on "Hate on the Right." In fact the word "HATE" takes up half a page, white letters on a black background, with the subhead "Antigovernment extremists are on the rise – and on the march."

Pictures illustrating the article strangely connect Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin with 1930's socialists. The caption read: "Huey Long castigated the rich and Father Coughlin denounced Jews in the 1930s. Today, the microphones belong to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin." (Beck's previous impassioned rebuttal of the comparison to Coughlin is ignored.) This would not be the first time Newsweek's imagined "right wing" Coughlin as an Obama foil.

Evan Thomas and Eve Conant utilize the usual liberal experts – Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who unloads his usual line about militias "roaring back," and historian Alan Brinkley, who opines that "the current surge of fear and loathing toward Obama is ‘scary,' he says. ‘There's a big dose of race behind the real crazies, the ones who take their guns to public meetings. I can't see this happening if McCain were president.'"

Appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS Monday, New Yorker editor (and former Washington Post reporter) David Remnick tried to argue his way out of his new book’s reporting on the phoniness of Barack Obama. Remnick suggested Obama has been a "translator" between races and cultures.

Rose asked him to discuss Reverend Wright. By dumping him, the most significant message Remnick came away with was "He wanted to win," so dumping Wright was essential, and inescapable. But Remnick still tried to claim that "there’s a lot of positive qualities in Jeremiah Wright, and it’s foolish to look past them. He was a social activist. He was utterly committed to his community, a church community that grew."

The "translator" talk occurred as Remnick also tried to revise and extend his remarks on Meet the Press that Obama didn’t have the talents of Ronald Reagan:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s longtime minister and permanent embarrassment, preached in Washington on Wednesday, reported  Hamil Harris of The Washington Post. (It was nowhere to be found in my Thursday paper.) Harris suggested Wright's nastiest words were saved for Fox News, which wanted to ruin his granddaughters. It sounded a little like paranoid Ross Perot in 1992. The anti-Obama press was at their senior prom?

The YouTube videos focused damaging attention on his family, Wright said, and especially on his youngest daughter, Jamila Wright, and a granddaughter.

"The day I took Jamila to campus, Fox News was on the sidewalk taking my picture. My granddaughter got into a fistfight at FAMU [Florida A&M University] because people only know the press narrative about Jeremiah Wright," he said. "The press didn't care what they did to my family. They ruined their senior year in high school. They were at the senior prom, the graduation, waiting on something to try to destroy Obama."

The Obama family's continued lack of church-going in Washington was spun by ABCNews.com into something cute and positive, at least from the sound of the headline: "Holy BlackBerry! Obama Finds Ways to Keep the Faith During First Year in Office."

ABC’s Devin Dwyer recycled the tidbit from Terry Moran’s Nightline interview with Obama last July where Obama said he keeps the faith by getting daily devotions on his BlackBerry.

No one in the ABC piece is allowed to question if Obama now has a phobia about church attendance due to his 20-year membership in the church of radical-left Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dwyer can’t even bring himself to mention Wright’s name, only that Obama quit "Chicago’s embattled Trinity United Church of Christ." He couldn’t get any more specific than that.

Does the name Jeremiah Wright ring a bell with Mika Brzezinski?

The Morning Joe co-host sought today to explain the pass Pres. Obama gave Harry "negro dialect" Reid by claiming that PBO has "worked to transcend racial issues for decades." The skeptical look on Joe Scarborough's face [see still after jump] as Mika uttered her assertion was priceless.

Let's take a stroll down memory lane with Rev. Wright [h/t Bump Shack], and consider that as far as the record shows, PBO never uttered a peep as his pastor made the following remarks, and to the contrary chose this man to wed him and Michelle and baptize his children:

Three days ago, I argued that the Washington Post was ginning up a new campaign to discredit Republican governor-elect Bob McDonnell, having failed to sink his candidacy  by its continual harping about his culturally conservative graduate's thesis at Pat Robertson's Regent University.

Today the Post confirmed my suspicions as its editorial board officially weighed in, proclaiming Robertson -- who made some controversial statements following the Fort Hood shootings about Islam -- to be "Mr. McDonnell's albatross":

It's unfair to expect politicians to be held accountable for every asinine thing that a supporter happens to say. But in this case -- when the supporter is among Mr. McDonnell's most prominent associates, and the level of support is extremely high -- it's important to know that he is as disgusted by Mr. Robertson's casual bigotry as millions of his constituents are. 

This begs the question how the Post handled the Obama/Rev. Wright controversy. My research indicates the Post was thrilled at Obama's March 2008 non-denunciation denunciation of Wright so much that the next month it all but declared it would never hound Obama ever again for anything stupid Wright should say. Let's look first at the March 19, 2008 "Moment of Truth" editorial (emphases mine):

We wrote Monday of Leftist, George Soros-funded "media reform" outfit Free Press, and their extensive relationships with people currently in power at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and in the White House - up to and including President Barack Obama.

With current FCC Chief Diversity Officer ("Diversity Czar") Mark Lloyd and the Leftist, George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, Free Press co-authored the 2007 report The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.  Which calls for the FCC to enforce exceedingly broad (we would say warped) new definitions of the media diversity and localism FCC broadcast license requirements. These new definitions and their enactment are intended to force conservative and Christian talk show hosts off the air, to be replaced by those of a Leftist bent.

Free Press developed then-presidential candidate Obama's communications policies portfolio.  Now-President Obama's FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski hired Free Press Press Secretary Jen Howard to serve in the same capacity for the FCC. And Marxist 9-11 "Truther" Van Jones - who was President Obama's "Green Jobs Czar" until his multi-layered, anti-American and paranoid past came to light, forcing him to resign - was a Free Press Board member until 2008.

We also mentioned Free Press's co-founder, college professor and avowed Marxist Robert McChesney. (Some fairly interesting video quotes from him at right; inordinately interesting print quotes from him below the fold.)  If you have not yet already had enough Marxism and Marxists, please - read on (warning - there's a Reverend Jeremiah Wright on-video sighting beneath as well).

"We're no longer a Christian nation." - President Barack Obama, June 2007
 
"America has been arrogant." - President Barack Obama
 
"After 9/11, America didn't always live up to her ideals."- President Barack Obama
 
"You might say that America is a Muslim nation."- President Barack Obama, Egypt 2009
 
Thinking about these and other statements made by the man who wears the title of president. I keep wondering what country he believes he's president of.

If you've ever wondered why the mainstream media didn't show much curiosity about how 20 years of attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church shaped President Barack Obama, there is a perfectly logical explanation. Obama wasn't really there.

According to Richard Wolffe, an MSNBC contributor and former Newsweek columnist that covered the Obama presidential campaign for the weekly magazine, people don't have to worry about the rantings and ravings of Obama's controversial preacher having any impact on his world view because he wasn't there.

Wolffe, in an appearance at the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on June 15 promoting his book about Obama, "Renegade," told the audience the president wasn't naïve about Wright - he was ignorant.

For all the bluster from the Left during the Bush administration about the doctrine of preemptive warfare, it seems at least one journalist favors the doctrine adapted for use within the U.S. justice system to prevent lone-wolf terroristic violence.

U.S. News & World Report contributor and PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbe on June 11 sounded a decidedly authoritarian note in a Thomas Jefferson Street blog post in which she called for "rounding up" hatemongers like James von Brunn or Scott Roeder before they turn violent.

Oddly enough, Erbe -- who has always favored Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama  -- seems to suggest that the president's former pastor might be such a killer-in-waiting:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright has attempt to clarify his remarks when he said in Virginia that "them Jews" are keeping him from seeing Barack Obama in the White House. In an interview with Mark Thompson on the Sirius Left satellite-radio channel, Wright said he meant to single out them "Zionists," not Jews.

In the brief audio clip posted, Wright also went on to imply that the Holocaust of six million Jews is much smaller than the "black Holocaust." He responded to the Holocaust Museum shooting by deploring violence and talking about "millions of African Americans killed," citing historians like Chiekh Anta Diop and John Henrik Clarke to unload the estimate of 100 to 150 million murders. I'm sure Obama would have preferred the lack of "clarification."

With recent anti-Semitic remarks, Whoopi and Joy finally condemned Reverend Wright, while Joy ludicrously denied ever supporting President Obama’s former pastor. On the June 11 edition of "The View," Joy Behar logically concluded Wright is indeed an anti-Semite and even branded the reverend "evil."

When Elisabeth Hasselbeck noted such comments are on par with Wright’s past ravings, Behar immediately countered "no one liked him on this panel." While Joy may not have been Wright’s biggest cheerleader, she has attempted to justify Reverend Wright’s extreme remarks even labeling Wright’s "God Damn America" sermon "righteous," spinning an anti-Italian slur as a "compliment" and refused to "sit in judgement" over Wright’s sermons "because I’m not black."

Actor Jon Voight, who recently spoke critically of President Obama at a Republican fundraiser, appeared on Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor to reiterate his problems with Obama. After recounting that America was "warned" by Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during the Democratic primary season that Obama "had no experience" and was a "novice," the conservative actor reminded FNC viewers of the unheeded warnings about Obama's connections to questionable figures like Bill Ayers and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

Look, he was a fellow who was associated with all the wrong people. The signs were up. His associations with Bill Ayers, Alinsky, with ACORN, with Pfleger, with Wright. But no one seemed to take the warnings. And his inexperience was quite evident.