Unbalanced Unfairness

From Media complicit in making Wright look bad by Kenneth F. Bunting:

Barack Obama's forceful denunciation and disavowal of his former pastor doesn't change the fact that it is an irrelevant distraction entirely created by cable television pundits using out-of-context and skewed sound bites.

Moyers' illuminating interview with Wright didn't fit the narrative that portrays Wright as an unpatriotic hatemonger with outrageous views. Moyers played longer excerpts of the very same sermons of which the seconds-long snippets had been aired over and over.

Wright, responding in the Moyers interview in a conversational style, came across as a reasonable man, hurt by what he felt were unfair portrayals, but not immodest. He and Moyers talked about his scholarly influences and his impressive 36-year ministry at the Chicago church where he met Obama.

At the end of it, I wondered if the pundits who had been so obsessed with Wright and so determined to define him had watched it and how they would treat it. For the next 30 hours I flipped repeatedly between CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Nothing. It was as if Wright's first extended interview hadn't taken place. Even on networks that had teased the Moyers interview repeatedly, using excerpts from the two-minutes of it that PBS had posted in advance on its Web site, there was no comment, no analysis, no report about what had been said in the interview.

Fair and balanced, indeed.

And the best that Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich can come up with is to call Bill Moyers names. How mature of them. Unlike them, Bill Moyers deserves our respect. He has earned it.