Jeremiah Wright’s speeches in Detroit Sunday night and at the National Press Club Monday morning are unquestionably the most explosive story so far in the 2008 presidential campaign. You would never guess that from reading today’s Boston Globe.
On the Globe’s front page Wright get’s only a pointer item to a very understated story on page A6, and a second context story from AP with a few extended quotes. The Op Ed page is silent. Globe Washington Bureau Chief Peter Canellos writes today about Obama’s stance on affirmative action. Is the Globe so tight on cash these days that poor Peter doesn’t have access to C-Span?
But of course Wright's remarks are not a big story, correct?
Wright merely served as Obama’s pastor for 20 years. It not like they had a close relationship, the way Mitt Romney did with this groundskeeper.
This is not as relevant as the story the Globe wrote about Mitt Romney’s Latin American groundskeeper hiring illegal immigrants. Now that was big news and was all over the front page, because it was relevant to the campaign. But this story about the man who married Obama, baptized his children, and served as his pastor for 20 years is not that big. It’s not that relevant.
Wright thinks the government created HIV to harm blacks? No big deal. He uses security guards from the Nation of Islam at the National Press Club? Unmentioned. He invokes some bizarre forms of phrenology (phrenology is a safe word choice here. Let’s not be the ones to use the R-word) while speaking to the NAACP (!) in Detroit and says that black people and white people are different because they have different kinds of brains? Also unmentioned.
Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web, James Taranto asked with tongue in cheek, “Democratic front-runner Barack Obama was supposed to unite the country, overcoming racial and even partisan division. How's that working out?”
Not much news about that in the Boston Globe, James. It must be working out just fine.
2 comments:
Prepare yourself for the 'inverted article' tomorrow where the Globe writers are tasked with describing Obama's disavowal of an incident of which Globe readers are ignorant. It is such a classic Globe style, perfected in the Swiftboat days, of explaining a response fist, and then the 'response to' in the second paragraph.
Bingo!
You are probably exactly right, flymorgue. Inverted article is a good term, but could be confused with the frequent Globe practice of hiding the key information in the last paragraph of a story...forcing readers to read from the back to the front.
I was going to mention the Swift Boat days as well, but it just didn't come out.
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