A Complex Speech, Boiled Down to Simple Politics

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Obama's 'A More Perfect Union' Speech

Barack Obama spoke Tuesday in Philadelphia about his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, and addressed the nation's racial struggles.

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That proved a lightning rod for some conservative critics. "What he did," the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said on Fox, "was throw his grandmother under the bus."

Others on the right offered mixed reviews. National Review called the speech "eloquently written, and at times moving. . . . But it should be noted that Obama deployed his formidable talents to try to minimize and excuse Rev. Wright's rants."

To their credit, the network newscasts ran four or five sound bites to evoke Obama's broader argument that while the anger of older blacks like Wright, 66, is understandable, the country needs to move beyond the racial wounds of the past. But Obama, 46, is trying to win the Democratic nomination, so the anchors kept returning to one core question.

"Is it enough to reassure white voters?" ABC's Charlie Gibson asked.

"Does it make too many white voters uncomfortable?" asked CBS's Katie Couric.

One lingering question for the news business is why, during 15 months of intense and largely positive coverage of Obama's candidacy, it took so long to focus on the pastor and family friend whose controversial views were no secret.

In March 2007, Fox News's Hannity conducted a contentious interview with Wright, saying that if a church made such comments about whites, "wouldn't we call that church racist?"

"No, we would call it Christianity," Wright responded.

Also that month, the New York Times quoted Wright as saying he had been disinvited from Obama's presidential announcement to avoid negative attention.

There were other hints. In a YouTube video posted a year ago, Wright rattled off a series of assertions about the country: "America is the number one killer in the world. . . . We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God."

In January, the Baltimore Sun reported on a sermon in which Wright repeatedly "singled out 'white reporters' for criticism," "talked of blacks being held down by attitudes of white supremacy," and charged that Bill Clinton "did the same thing to us that he did to Monica Lewinsky." And that same weekend, Post columnist Richard Cohen criticized Wright for his support of Louis Farrakhan, an issue also raised by NBC's Tim Russert at a debate last month.

But it wasn't until last week, when Fox News and ABC News bought DVDs of Wright's sermons from the church, that the simmering controversy reached full boil. The recordings have long been sold by the church, but journalists did not seek them until now.

Fox Chicago correspondent Jeff Goldblatt says he was looking into whether Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ deserved its tax-exempt status. In his report on Wednesday, March 12, he played a clip of Wright saying that the country is "controlled by rich white people" and that Hillary Clinton "ain't never been called a [N-word]."

"When it became palpable to the public is when there was a videotape," Goldblatt says.

On "Good Morning America" the next day, Brian Ross played video of Wright saying "God damn America," asserting that the government gives African Americans drugs and that the 9/11 attacks showed "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Ross says the tapes he ordered came in early this month and he soon "realized they went beyond what had earlier been reported. . . . The 'God damn America' and 'US of KKK A' and 9/11 took it to a level that surprised me." Ross dispatched a crew to the church and the story was supposed to run early last week, but got bumped by the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal.

But even as CNN and MSNBC began airing the Wright videos, the New York Times and "NBC Nightly News" ran only brief items Friday, and The Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, USA Today and the "CBS Evening News" carried nothing. It wasn't until Saturday that the controversy hit The Post's front page.