Which raises the question: why hadn’t we learned that before? Why wasn’t the fuller picture of Wright—serviceman, intellectual, community organizer—part of the narrative that spread about him in the mass media? Why didn’t we in the press do a better job of fleshing out Wright as a full, complex person—with the mix of strengths and weaknesses that is in us all—rather than dismissing him as an empty amalgamation of incendiary sound bites? That more humanized picture of Wright wouldn’t have explained away his comments, but it would have, at least, started to explain them—and placed them in the proper human context. It would have rooted them in the complexity of the African-American experience, rather than letting them hover, disembodied, in the ether of the cable news cycle.

Indeed, when Obama noted, in his speech, that we’re more than the sum of our parts, he wasn’t just talking about the country. He was talking about its citizens. And he was talking, in large part, to the press—to the people charged with taking that country and those citizens out of the abstract, with humanizing them by telling their stories.

As CNN’s Roland Martin asked last night, “Are we going to keep running the same comments over and over, or are we going to get behind the story?”

The Wright portrayal makes a particularly baffling case, given that so much of the pastor’s media narrative developed and played out on the twenty-four-hour cable networks. When the quality of those networks’ coverage is panned, after all, the excuse offered in their defense is generally some iteration of, “Well, we have twenty-four hours of air to fill. Of course it’s not all going to be great journalism.” Which is fair enough. But it doesn’t explain Wright’s case, in which the problem with the pastor’s portrayal was its very brevity—its very filtering into the restrictive, often misleading vessel of the sound bite. The networks had all the time in the world—literally 24/7—to tell Wright’s story, to put his anger in context. But they didn’t.

In The Nation today, John Nichols explores this missing depth:

At the most basic level, Obama did what the media has failed to do. He presented Wright and Wright’s comments on U.S. domestic and foreign policies in context: the context of the African-American religious experience, the context of the candidate’s connection to the church and, above all, the context of this country’s unresolved experience of what Obama correctly refers to as ‘the original sin’ of the American experiment—human bondage—and its legacy. The speech was masterful in this regard.

Which, I think, is all too true. And, in that, all too sad a commentary. Did it really take Obama to do our jobs for us? Did it really take a politician to fulfill the duties of the press? Did it really take a newsmaker to step in and tell the newsgatherers how to frame their stories?

In this case, it seems, it did. Which brings us back to Kurtz and the “challenge” Obama has issued to us in the media. When Obama argues that “we the people” should strive to overcome the “original sin” of our nationhood, he means “we” as Americans, but he also means, I think—and even more urgently—“we the press.” We’re the ones who should be guiding the national conversation about race, who should be transforming the country, in that sense, into a more perfect union. The media have a pulpit, after all—a bully pulpit, some might call it, but a pulpit nonetheless—when it comes to guiding that conversation and shaping our future. We should be using it.

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