It was the moment of greatest peril for then-Sen. Barack Obama’s political career. In the heat of the presidential campaign, videos surfaced of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, angrily denouncing whites, the U.S. government and America itself. Obama had once bragged of his closeness to Wright. Now the black nationalist preacher’s rhetoric was threatening to torpedo Obama’s campaign.Sounds like Gibson and Stephanopoulos were doing their job, right? Perhaps, but some liberal media members were not happy and started plotting ways to eliminate the story from the news cycle.
The crisis reached a howling pitch in mid-April, 2008, at an ABC News debate moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Gibson asked Obama why it had taken him so long – nearly a year since Wright’s remarks became public – to dissociate himself from them. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you think Reverend Wright loves America as much as you do?”
Watching this all at home were members of Journolist, a listserv comprised of several hundred liberal journalists, as well as like-minded professors and activists. The tough questioning from the ABC anchors left many of them outraged. “George [Stephanopoulos],” fumed Richard Kim of the Nation, is “being a disgusting little rat snake.”Sound familiar?
Others went further. According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. 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.
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.”
As I noted in my previous post, labeling someone with the tag "racists" is the liberals favorite tactic. It is mean, spiteful, hateful and 99 times out of 100, just flat out wrong. That so-called journalists have political views is not the problem, nor would one or two or even a dozen journalists, working independently, to burnish Obama's reputation during the scandal be a problem for me (so long as they were doing it in the op-ed pages and not in the news pages). But when a group of journalists, self-selected liberals, discuss and collude to hide a legitimate story about the credibility, background and thinking of a presidential candidate--that is a real problem, nay a scandal.
I have never met the President personally (and not likely to), but I don't need to meet the man in order to make a decision about his politics. That doesn't make me racist--it makes me conservative, libertarian or simply a guy who doesn't like the Obama policy program. I don't know if Fred Barnes or Karl Rove are racists and given that I have no evidence on the matter, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
Simply put, this story is going to get some legs and it will not look good for the mainstream press.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/#ixzz0uFAq6pJe
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