Jeremiah Wright

WaPo Finds It Scandalous Beck Would Challenge Obama's Religious Beliefs
By Tim Graham | August 30, 2010 | 7:23 AM EDT

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.

After JournoList Exposé, No One Better Ever Deny Liberal Media Bias Again
By Brent Bozell | July 22, 2010 | 12:18 PM EDT

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.

Flashback 2008: CNN’s Roberts Declares ‘Rev. Wright-Free Zone’ During Obama Interview
By Noel Sheppard | July 20, 2010 | 9:52 AM EDT

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):

Media Liberals on 'JournoList' Plotted to Bury the Jeremiah Wright Story in 2008
By Tim Graham | July 20, 2010 | 8:14 AM EDT

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.”

Obama's Former Rev. Wright Gives Seminar Bashing Whites and Jews, Media Mum
By Noel Sheppard | June 27, 2010 | 11:07 AM EDT

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):

CNN Blames White People For Obama's Slow Action On Oil Spill
By Candance Moore | June 9, 2010 | 5:24 PM EDT
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):

Newsweek Denounces Hateful 'Antigovernment Extremists' -- Like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin
By Tim Graham | April 15, 2010 | 4:39 PM EDT

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.'"

Author Says Obama Is Not a 'Phony' When He Changes His Speech Patterns, He's a 'Translator'
By Tim Graham | April 6, 2010 | 5:30 PM EDT

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:

Say What? Rev. Wright Claims Fox News Ruined His Granddaughter's Senior Prom
By Tim Graham | March 12, 2010 | 7:18 AM EST

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."

Holy BlackBerry? ABC Sticks to Obama Staffers and Friends on Church Avoidance in Year One
By Tim Graham | February 1, 2010 | 5:05 PM EST

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.

Remember Wright? Mika Says Obama 'Worked For Decades' To Transcend Racial Issues
By Mark Finkelstein | January 12, 2010 | 7:51 AM EST

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:

WaPo: McDonnell Should Denounce Robertson; Paper Praised Obama's Quasi-Repudiation of Wright
By Ken Shepherd | November 18, 2009 | 3:21 PM EST

<p>Three days ago, I argued that <a href="/blogs/ken-shepherd/2009/11/15/wapo-seeks-put-gop-gov-elect-mcdonnell-bind-over-pat-robertsons-remark" target="_blank">the Washington Post </a>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. </p><p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/17/AR200911... target="_blank">&quot;Mr. McDonnell's albatross&quot;</a>:</p><blockquote><p>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.  </p></blockquote><p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/18/AR200803... target="_blank">March 19, 2008 &quot;Moment of Truth&quot; editorial</a> (emphases mine):</p><blockquote>