Hell Freezes Over - Ombudsmen at NYT & PBS Hit Wright Coverage

On the other hand, as ombudsmen often say, this came across to me more as a conversation among theologians than it did as a truly probing interview with a truly controversial person who had said some truly inflammatory things and had become deeply inserted into a tight, hard-fought and historic race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

While I don't endorse the language or the broader criticisms below, I do feel that there were not enough questions asked and some that were asked came across as too reserved and too soft, considering the volatility of the charges. For example, after replaying at length a Wright sermon delivered the first Sunday after 9/11 - in which Wright invoked America's role in slavery, taking the country from the Indians, bombing Grenada, Panama, Libyan leader Gaddafi's house, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Iraq, plus state terrorism against Palestinians and black South Africans to conclude that the 9/11 attacks were "America's chickens are coming home to roost" - Moyers asked: "When people saw the sound bites from it this year, they were upset because you seemed to be blaming America. Did you somehow fail to communicate?" As Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post afterwards: "Thought he was blaming America? Where did anyone get that idea?" It would be hard to formulate a more delicate way to put a question to Wright about that sermon without challenging any of its content.

Carol Hebb of Narberth, Pa., spoke for many when she wrote that she found the newspaper's initial coverage "very strange." If editors did not think Wright's remarks were newsworthy enough to be on the front page, she asked, why did they put the review by Alessandra Stanley there? "I was very surprised that her piece was not accompanied by a 'factual' article reporting the content of Mr. Wright's comments more completely and perhaps adding some meaningful context."

Stanley's review called Wright "the compelling but slightly wacky uncle who unsettles strangers but really just craves attention." The pastor, Stanley wrote, "doesn't hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice." Virtually the identical opinion could be found that same day on the Op-Ed page, in a column by Bob Herbert, who said Wright was "living a narcissist's dream." The ink-on-paper Times did not deal with Wright's discussion of the "multilayered and rich tapestry of the black religious experience" or his theology of liberation, transformation and reconciliation until today, elsewhere in this section.

Peter Weltner of San Francisco wrote that he wished The Times had examined what he said were falsehoods in Wright's remarks - like the claim that blacks and whites learn with different parts of their brains - instead of "merely guessing why Mr. Wright said it."

 I'm with Hebb and Weltner. For a newspaper that showed great enterprise on the subject last year - breaking the story that Obama had disinvited Wright to deliver the invocation at the announcement of his presidential campaign, and publishing a deep examination of their relationship before most Americans had heard of Wright - it was a performance strangely lacking in energy at a potential turning point in the election.