So there’s a new study from Media Matters that chides the media for obsessing over Barack Obama’s relationship with his fiery former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, while paying scant attention to John McCain and the controversial Rev. John Hagee.
A Media Matters for America review found that since February 27, the date that televangelist John Hagee endorsed Sen. John McCain for president, The New York Times and The Washington Post combined have published more than 12 times as many articles mentioning Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and Sen. Barack Obama as they have mentioning Hagee and McCain.
In case you missed it-because granted, it hasn’t gotten the same kind of attention that Obama/Wright has-Hagee is the leading Christian zionist and San Antonio megachurch pastor who came under fire for what some Catholic groups thought were anti-Catholic statements. Calling the church the “whore of Babylon” (or at least implying it) will get you in trouble, however you meant it to come across. But I digress.
A couple of thoughts. First off, while the Washington Post and the NY Times are certainly influential and the gold standard for the print media, they are hardly representative of all media. That’s just to say that if you want to see how “the media” cover the two pastor-politician relationships, you might want to cast your net just a tad wider.
But my bigger gripe with this study is that the relationship between Obama/Wright and McCain/Hagee are not even remotely similar. Wright was Obama’s pastor for 20 years, married him and his wife and baptized his children. The title for Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, was taken from a Wright sermon. And while the two have suffered a very public falling out of late, their relationship was a close, personal, longlasting one.
Hagee, on the other hand, had very little contact with McCain, if any, so far as we can tell, before his endorsement. Sure, he endorsed McCain, but not until after McCain had tied up the nomination. And McCain’s staff had so little knowledge of Hagee that they didn’t even know about his statements on Catholics-much less his assertion that God sent Hurricane Katrina because New Orleans was going to host a gay pride parade.
Hagee’s endorsement was one of convenience-for McCain, who’s still trying to shore up the GOP’s evangelical base, and for Hagee, who’s never met a television camera he doesn’t like and would like to have a seat at the table in a McCain White House.