Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Right-wing media tries to create Obama secret video scandal. World says 'that's the best you have?'

Sean Hannity on Fox News with chyron saying Developing: Right-wing media tries to invent outrage over widely publicized 2007 speech on debate eve. The far right must really be desperate. Matt Drudge, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity spent Tuesday afternoon and evening breathlessly hyping a video of Barack Obama that a Drudge tweet claimed would "cause controversy, ignite accusations of racism'in both directions." Then, all their hype about the secret new Obama video that was going to shock and outrage us all gave way to this:
Drudge, Daily Caller, and Fox call 2007 tape "exclusively obtained by Daily Caller" Was open event that CNN & others covered.
' @SamFeistCNN via web In the video, then-Sen. Barack Obama speaks to an audience of black ministers at Virginia's Hampton University, addressing questions of race more directly than he typically does; right-wing media are basically trying to use this to create a "scary black man is racist" storyline. Again. But as Politico's Dylan Byers reports, the hype fell flat:
"What's the 'So what' of this video? I don't think it's going to really go anywhere,' Republican Rep. Allen West said on Fox News.

'I don't think this particular speech is definitive," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, though he added that it was at least a "reminder" of Obama's "pattern of dishonesty."

If the footage failed to impress, it may be because Sen. Obama's remarks were widely covered'by Carlson, by Fox News, and by the mainstream media'when they were made on June 5, 2007.

Yet hours after we found out that the video was something that had long been public, that had been widely covered at the time, and that even Allen West didn't think it was a bombshell, Politico's Mike Allen was still trying to turn it into a media critique/election story:
The 2007 videotape of then-Senator Obama that surfaced last night and rocketed through right-wing media. The N.Y. Times and WashPost ignored it on their homepages this morning, but conservatives will force the MSM and voters to reckon with it. No doubt, some of the quotes could be used against President Obama.
That cutting-edge analysis comes just four years and a month after Politico's Jim Vandehei and Harry Siegel hypothesized that Obama's mention of Jeremiah Wright in the supposedly new and secret video "seems tailor-made for an attack ad." It's 2012, and Jeremiah Wright's day as a campaign issue is long over, but the right-wing media is trying, with an assist from the "Drudge rules our world" crowd, to to find something else in the same damn video to turn into a scandal. Because Barack Obama talking about race to an audience of black people must be scandalous somehow, right? Right?


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