Greetings from the train to Philadelphia, where Barack Obama will give his big speech this morning. In advance of the speech, the Jeremiah Wright story finally got big-time coverage in the Washington Post, with a front-page story headlined “Congregation Defends Obama’s Ex-Pastor.” Reading the story, however, you wouldn’t know that Wright had said the words “God damn America.” But you would learn that Wright has on occasion been “overcome at the pulpit by a righteous rage about racism and social injustice.”
Speaking of “God damn America,” if you read only the New York Times — if that were your only source of news — you might not even know that Wright had uttered those words. A Nexis search shows that the only place Rev. Wright’s “God damn America” proclamation has been reported in the Times was in Bill Kristol’s column yesterday. That column was noticed mostly for a factual error — Kristol repeated a claim from an inaccurate NewsMax report — but as serious as that was, it seems that Times readers should at least thank Bill for telling them what the news pages would not.