New York:
In the summer of 2007, his campaign for the White House well under way, Senator Barack Obama waded into the minefield of racial politics and accused President George W. Bush of sitting idly by as a "quiet riot" simmered in black communities.
The news created a stir. NBC News led its "Nightly News" broadcast with it. The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune wrote about it, and it was mentioned in a New York Times Op-Ed column. The conservative writer and pundit Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to it on his MSNBC program.
Then the speech largely faded away - until last month, when someone calling himself "Sore Throwt" started e-mailing conservative activists and news media outlets claiming to have a bombshell video that would jolt the presidential election.
On Tuesday, on the eve of the first presidential debate between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, Mr. Carlson's current venture, The Daily Caller, a Web site started with financial help from the conservative donor Foster Friess, pushed the video back into circulation.
And its report brought to the forefront a wave of questions that have long been favorite topics in conservative circles: about Mr. Obama's views on race; his associations with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and whether the mainstream media was willfully ignoring embarrassing episodes from Mr. Obama's past.
The video of Mr. Obama's 2007 remarks shows him saying complimentary things about Mr. Wright, questioning whether race was a reason that federal aid was slow to reach New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and speaking in a more distinctly African-American idiom than he normally uses in public addresses. By Wednesday morning, it had mushroomed into a lead story on the network news programs, a dominant theme of cable news coverage and a developing story online.
For conservatives like Mr. Carlson, the episode was complete vindication. Months ago, many Republicans rushed to distance themselves from an aborted plan by another conservative donor, Joe Ricketts, to finance a campaign that would have touched on similar themes, and Democrats dismissed the video this time as old news. Yet with the campaign moving into its final stages, and Mr. Romney fighting to overcome the fallout from a video in which he was secretly taped making disparaging comments about the "47 percent," the Obama video quickly caught fire.
Mr. Carlson and the editors of his Web site, which was founded with $3.5 million in seed money from Mr. Friess, who was a leading backer of Rick Santorum's "super PAC," immediately saw the relevance of the tape to their conservative audience. To them, it was a perfect confluence of all their complaints about the way the mainstream media has covered Mr. Obama: credulously and insufficiently.
The Drudge Report picked up word of the news before it broke, alerting readers on Tuesday afternoon that a major scoop was coming. "The Accent ... The Anger ... The Accusations," the headline teased.
After Mr. Carlson posted the article on his Web site, timed for the prime-time Fox News programming lineup, he appeared on the Sean Hannity program on Fox to explain what he had found. There was the president, speaking in a way that he usually does not in public, telling a black audience, a group of black clergy members at Hampton University in Virginia, that the government did not care about them.
The president was using racial tensions to try to divide America into different classes of people, Mr. Carlson argued. And the accent? To him, it was further evidence of the argument that many Obama opponents on the right have been pushing in their writings, talk shows and films for years: We don't really know who this man is.
A conspiracy theory cottage industry has sprung up around the notion that Mr. Obama is somehow foreign, if not by birth than by ideology. Donald Trump breathed new life into a career as a cable news pundit by repeatedly questioning whether the president's birth certificate was authentic.
Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative author and filmmaker, has a new movie in theatrical release called "Obama 2016" concludes Mr. Obama's father, a Kenyan, instilled anti-Americanism in his son at an early age.
One of the film's financial backers was Mr. Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade, who considered getting behind a multimillion-dollar ad campaign that would have linked Mr. Obama to his former pastor, Mr. Wright, who became a source of embarrassment for the president.
In many ways, Mr. Hannity was an ideal first stop for Mr. Carlson. Through the year Mr. Hannity has featured a segment "Vetting the President," often focusing on foibles from Mr. Obama's past or over his tenure. As Mr. Hannity said in March, "We call it 'Vetting the President.'
Because the mainstream media, they're not going to do it. They helped elect him. They hid a lot of things about his past."
And after the video's release on The Daily Caller and Mr. Hannity's program, it was the talk of the rest of the conservative news media. "Clearly race-baiting, clearly angry, and I'm telling you: This is who he is to this day," Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience on Wednesday. Mr. Carlson declined to say on Tuesday how he acquired the full video, which news networks have had in their libraries since it was first shot in 2007. He said only that he had received the video in the last few days.
The video had apparently been circulating in conservative circles at least a week. One person contacted about it described receiving an e-mail pitch from someone calling himself Sore Throwt, a pun on Deep Throat, who helped uncover the Watergate scandal.
Sore Throwt wanted to be paid in exchange for handing over the video, this person said, speaking anonymously in order to divulge a conversation he had promised to keep confidential.
Mr. Carlson would not say whether he paid for the tape.
But he objected to the notion that he was merely recycling old news. What he thought was most provocative about it - Mr. Obama's apparent attempt to link race to the slow Katrina recovery effort - did not, he said, receive coverage at the time, including on his own program. "We've already seen this? Really? That's untrue," he said, objecting to criticisms that the tape offered little new. "I feel like I'm in an alternative universe."
The news created a stir. NBC News led its "Nightly News" broadcast with it. The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune wrote about it, and it was mentioned in a New York Times Op-Ed column. The conservative writer and pundit Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to it on his MSNBC program.
Then the speech largely faded away - until last month, when someone calling himself "Sore Throwt" started e-mailing conservative activists and news media outlets claiming to have a bombshell video that would jolt the presidential election.
On Tuesday, on the eve of the first presidential debate between Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney, Mr. Carlson's current venture, The Daily Caller, a Web site started with financial help from the conservative donor Foster Friess, pushed the video back into circulation.
And its report brought to the forefront a wave of questions that have long been favorite topics in conservative circles: about Mr. Obama's views on race; his associations with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and whether the mainstream media was willfully ignoring embarrassing episodes from Mr. Obama's past.
The video of Mr. Obama's 2007 remarks shows him saying complimentary things about Mr. Wright, questioning whether race was a reason that federal aid was slow to reach New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and speaking in a more distinctly African-American idiom than he normally uses in public addresses. By Wednesday morning, it had mushroomed into a lead story on the network news programs, a dominant theme of cable news coverage and a developing story online.
For conservatives like Mr. Carlson, the episode was complete vindication. Months ago, many Republicans rushed to distance themselves from an aborted plan by another conservative donor, Joe Ricketts, to finance a campaign that would have touched on similar themes, and Democrats dismissed the video this time as old news. Yet with the campaign moving into its final stages, and Mr. Romney fighting to overcome the fallout from a video in which he was secretly taped making disparaging comments about the "47 percent," the Obama video quickly caught fire.
Mr. Carlson and the editors of his Web site, which was founded with $3.5 million in seed money from Mr. Friess, who was a leading backer of Rick Santorum's "super PAC," immediately saw the relevance of the tape to their conservative audience. To them, it was a perfect confluence of all their complaints about the way the mainstream media has covered Mr. Obama: credulously and insufficiently.
The Drudge Report picked up word of the news before it broke, alerting readers on Tuesday afternoon that a major scoop was coming. "The Accent ... The Anger ... The Accusations," the headline teased.
After Mr. Carlson posted the article on his Web site, timed for the prime-time Fox News programming lineup, he appeared on the Sean Hannity program on Fox to explain what he had found. There was the president, speaking in a way that he usually does not in public, telling a black audience, a group of black clergy members at Hampton University in Virginia, that the government did not care about them.
The president was using racial tensions to try to divide America into different classes of people, Mr. Carlson argued. And the accent? To him, it was further evidence of the argument that many Obama opponents on the right have been pushing in their writings, talk shows and films for years: We don't really know who this man is.
A conspiracy theory cottage industry has sprung up around the notion that Mr. Obama is somehow foreign, if not by birth than by ideology. Donald Trump breathed new life into a career as a cable news pundit by repeatedly questioning whether the president's birth certificate was authentic.
Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative author and filmmaker, has a new movie in theatrical release called "Obama 2016" concludes Mr. Obama's father, a Kenyan, instilled anti-Americanism in his son at an early age.
One of the film's financial backers was Mr. Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade, who considered getting behind a multimillion-dollar ad campaign that would have linked Mr. Obama to his former pastor, Mr. Wright, who became a source of embarrassment for the president.
In many ways, Mr. Hannity was an ideal first stop for Mr. Carlson. Through the year Mr. Hannity has featured a segment "Vetting the President," often focusing on foibles from Mr. Obama's past or over his tenure. As Mr. Hannity said in March, "We call it 'Vetting the President.'
Because the mainstream media, they're not going to do it. They helped elect him. They hid a lot of things about his past."
And after the video's release on The Daily Caller and Mr. Hannity's program, it was the talk of the rest of the conservative news media. "Clearly race-baiting, clearly angry, and I'm telling you: This is who he is to this day," Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience on Wednesday. Mr. Carlson declined to say on Tuesday how he acquired the full video, which news networks have had in their libraries since it was first shot in 2007. He said only that he had received the video in the last few days.
The video had apparently been circulating in conservative circles at least a week. One person contacted about it described receiving an e-mail pitch from someone calling himself Sore Throwt, a pun on Deep Throat, who helped uncover the Watergate scandal.
Sore Throwt wanted to be paid in exchange for handing over the video, this person said, speaking anonymously in order to divulge a conversation he had promised to keep confidential.
Mr. Carlson would not say whether he paid for the tape.
But he objected to the notion that he was merely recycling old news. What he thought was most provocative about it - Mr. Obama's apparent attempt to link race to the slow Katrina recovery effort - did not, he said, receive coverage at the time, including on his own program. "We've already seen this? Really? That's untrue," he said, objecting to criticisms that the tape offered little new. "I feel like I'm in an alternative universe."
© 2012, The New York Times News Service
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