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All three newscasts had their campaign correspondents string together soundbites from the Rev Jeremiah Wright's q-&-a session at the National Press Club: NBC's Andrea Mitchell called Wright's time in the spotlight "an unwelcome distraction" for Barack Obama; ABC's David Wright (embargoed link) predicted that "the pastor will not make it easy for the politician to put this controversy behind him;" on CBS' Dean Reynolds saw Wright's reemergence as "a gift for the political opposition, which has stressed Obama's difference from the mainstream."
Reynolds' comment does not seem fair. Even Obama's opponents have stressed that it is his associates that are out of the "mainstream" not the candidate himself. Such criticisms have almost all amounted to guilt by association rather than direct attacks.
As for the content of Wright's pronouncements, these are the soundbites that were found newsworthy: he asserted that he served more patriotically in the military than Dick Cheney (ABC, CBS); he characterized the global reach of the US military as an empire, like Rome's, which killed Jesus Christ (ABC); he claimed that "all black America" listens to the speeches of the Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan (ABC, NBC); he accused his critics of targeting the entire African-American church (CBS, NBC); he repeated that God does, too, damn America, if ever its government transgresses (CBS); he insisted that the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, were a reaction to the United States' own terrorist acts overseas (NBC).
ABC followed up from the campaign trail itself where Jake Tapper saw the preacher reappearing at an "awkward time" for the candidate "when he is reaching out precisely to the very voters who are most likely to be alienated by Wright--white, blue collar voters." Confusingly Tapper did not elaborate on the nature of that alienation; instead he invoked a separate reason, entirely unrelated to Wright, namely the "perception" that Obama is "an elitist." So Tapper aired soundbites from Obama's autobiographical stump speech as the fatherless son of a teenaged mother. Thus the candidate, at this late stage "reintroduces himself as someone who does not just understand the working class but is of it."
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