The Sunday talk shows focused, not surprisingly, on Barack Obama's "rough week," and the two things that made it less rough: his phenomenal speech on race, and the endorsement he received from Bill Richardson.
On the race issue, an interesting discussion took place on CNN's "Reliable Sources," where finally, someone addressed the issue of the media's sound bite mentality, and general ignorance on the issues of race and Black churches. The latter point was made by CBS reporter Byron Pitts, who is black, and whom Kurtz introduced at the top of the show, remarkably as having just come from church... don't believe me, believe the transcript:
KURTZ: Joining us now to talk about race, the media and the campaign, in New York, Byron Pitt, national correspondent for CBS News. In Tampa, Eric Deggans, media critic for "The St. Petersburg Times." And in Seattle, Michael Medved, host of "The Michael Medved Show" on the Salem Radio Network.
Byron Pitts, as a black journalist who just came from church this Easter morning, do you look at this furor over Jeremiah Wright's remarks differently than white journalists? Are you less offended, perhaps?
And he speaks so well, too! (eyes rolling...)
BYRON PITTS, CBS NEWS: Oh, I think so. I mean, I've been black for 47 years, I was baptized in the Baptist Church when I was 12 years old. And so Reverend Wright said why -- much of why it was offensive, those are comments I've heard in church before, and I'm mindful of the context, that I think many of my colleagues who are white, they don't have that context.
Like, I was just looking at the clip you showed. All those commentators, all those reporters, were white. They have a different life experience. They have a different context. And I think this story speaks to the lack of diversity in major news organizations, that you have people speaking from a position of ignorance, because they don't understand the black church, that can't bring the context that we as journalists are supposed to bring to a news event.
KURTZ: A good point about diversity, but in one of your reports this week, you said that critics have called Reverend Wright's sermons anti-American. That critics have called them. I mean, this is a guy who said...
PITTS: Sure.
KURTZ: ... "The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genociding (ph) his people of color," who said, "God damn America," who said, "U.S. of KKKA."
Why push it off on critics?
PITTS: Well, I think there's some people -- I mean, I think there's some people who have the position that they disagree with much of what Reverend Wright said, but for some people, there is some basis of truth. I mean, I'm mindful of, you know, during Hurricane Katrina, there were people initially in that community who thought maybe the government had blown up the levee there, because, in fact, in New Orleans history, that in fact had happened.
For many people in black America, they remember how there's a time when our government injected black men with syphilis, I believe, that those kinds of thing occur. So, one of the things I thought that Barack -- a point that he made in his speech is how you have in the church, in the black church, there's this wealth of love, compassion, and truth, and some ignorance. And it's a world that if you're a pastor, that you have to navigate that world.
After that, the St. Pete Times' media critic, Eric Deggans (whom we used to book frequently on the morning show,) helpfully pointed out that the media coverage of Jeremiah Wright's now infamous speech clips, excluded the context in which the remarks were made -- context which could easily have been provided by playing longer sections of the 20-minute sermons, or by posting the transcripts. Deggans provides the former on his blog, and as it turns out, during the most "shocking" statement -- "God damn America," Wright was actually quoting someone else. Whoops...!
ERIC DEGGANS, "ST. PETERSBURG TIMES": Well, I think the biggest problem that we have here is that people haven't actually looked at what Reverend Wright said. On my blog, the feed for "The St. Petersburg Times," I've actually put up longer clips of the two controversial speeches, the 9/11 speech, and the speech in which he said, you know, an expletive, "America."
And when you see the actual sermons, you see that he's trying to make some very explosive points about America, but he's leading up to them in a way where those statements make a little more sense. And in fact, the "chickens coming home to roost" comments he made about 9/11, he was quoting someone else. And the ABC News report that initially revealed this made it seem as if those were his words.
And you know, as much as I like Byron, you know, the reference to black men being injected with syphilis, what actually happened is that they had syphilis and they weren't treated for it by a government program. And I think one of the problems we have in this debate is that journalists are not getting to the heart of what's actually going on here, taking a step back and really explaining these issues to the American people.
KURTZ: All right.
DEGGANS: What we're doing is taking the emotional part of it and constantly putting it before people in order to gin up a conversation that may be based on false assumptions.
One of the other guests, reporter Byron Pitts, even caught useless talker Michael Medved trotting out the old "Barack is so articulate" meme, making the point that what white people fear about Rev. Jeremiah Wright is his tone of voice -- while Barack rather soothes them because he plays against type -- you know, black Americans, though born and raised here, only speak proper English as some sort of parlor trick...
Back to Eric's blog. A portion of it bears reprinting:
Because Rev. Wright deserved a better defender than I -- or, frankly Barack Obama -- have been during this nonsense. A look at these clips, which present much larger excerpts of Wright's speeches, shows that his seemingly damning statements came during passionate speeches about America's history of racial oppression and America's history of killing innocents while exacting military revenge against enemies.
One of Rev. Wright's most controversial comments -- the statements about "chickens coming home to roost" after 9/11 -- was his quote of a white ambassador speaking on Fox News Channel. Why didn't the TV news reporters tell us this?
...including the so-called "investigative reporters" among them, who claim to have easily obtained tapes of the sermons, but who couldn't be bothered to watch the entire tapes? Did they just scan forward to the offending remarks? Or did they just go by the Youtube? Either way, you'd think a "responsible" news outfit or two would see fit to make the whole sermons available, or at least the transcripts, on their websites, no? Or to seek that context themselves, rather than simply absorbing the Wright story for its horse race value? Oh wait, we're talking about the American media... Here's one of the clips (Eric posts two of them). The theme, interestingly enough, given even Barack's formulation that Wright is mired in the past, is "governments change, but God does not":
More on that white ambassador from Sam Stein at the Huffpo:
Meet the man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's now famous tirade about America's foreign policy inciting the terrorist attacks of September 11.
His name is Ambassador Edward Peck. And he is a retired, white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32-years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter -- hardly the black-rage image with which Wright has been stigmatized.
In fact, when Wright took the pulpit to give his post-9/11 address -- which has since become boiled down to a five second sound bite about "America's chickens coming home to roost" -- he prefaced his remarks as a "faith footnote," an indication that he was deviating from his sermon.
"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday," Wright declared. "He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true: America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Wright then went on to list more than a few U.S. foreign policy endeavors that, by the tone of his voice and manner of his expression, he viewed as more or less deplorable. This included, as has been demonstrated in the endless loop of clips from his sermon, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuking "far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye."
And then he concluded by putting the comments on Peck's shoulders: "A white ambassador said that yall, not a black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice... the ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them... let me stop my faith footnote right there."
And yet, this contextualization of the Wright quotes will itself remain a footnote of this story, because the media, having issued a soundbite meme, rarely takes it back. So where does Rev. Wright go to get his reputation back?
