Thursday, May 1, 2008

Following the Rev. Wright Snippet Trail

WHO DUNNIT?

Is There
a Deep Throat
Transmitter of
the Wright Tapes?



By Tom Hayden

In the feeding frenzy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, one basic question is conspicuously ignored.

Who dunnit?

Who first obtained the tapes from Trinity Church?
Who first spliced and edited those tapes?
Who first took them to what media outlets?
Who first in the media received the tapes?
Who first decided to play those tapes over the air?

If the media was the source, would the tapes have been edited in the same fashion?
No one in the media has taken credit for discovering, editing and showing the tapes.
If it was an outsider, who was it? This matters for more than historical reasons. It matters if it was a hit job. It matters if the tapes were edited to maximize the negative. It matters if the media used the tapes without mentioning the source.
The question will be asked until it is answered.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

In this vein, here is a Huffington post about Sidney Blumenthal, who is emerging as Clinton's own Karl Rove (or one of them). Main dirty trick: sending outrageous attacks on Obama in the guise of fictitious right wing organizations.

even worse: the blogger says Blumenthal was the guy who coined "vast right wing conspiracy" for HC when she was defending Bill during the Monica Lewinsky scandal....

How do we get some mainstream coverage of this crap?

Nixon would love this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html

Anonymous said...

Perfect! Well spelled out. These are important questions that I keep wondering about too.

John Clark said...

ABC News did take "credit".
Here.

If I remember, there was some EweYubes put up days before the ABC story. I went back through my history --- all the pages associated had been scrubbed (if it was Direct Impact, they are good at this).

LDFan said...

Um...asked and answered!

The tapes were offered for sale at Trinity United Church. ABC bought the tapes, reviewed them, and presented some clips to their viewers!

LDFan said...

"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."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/20/AR2008032000964_pf.html

The trail is simple:
Erik Rush broke the story
Hannity picked it up
Rolling Stone picked it up
NYT picked it up
It lingered for a year
ABC News buys the dvd's from the chruch itself
Presto: your story...

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