Ronald Kessler devoted his May 15 Newsmax column to promoting the new Obama-bashing book by Edward Klein, “The Amateur,” focusing on one of Kessler’s favorite subjects, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
As Media Matters has detailed, Klein’s book “is filled with lazy research, bad writing, bizarre generalizations (‘Political wives have always found something to complain about’) and gossip forwarded by anonymous sources — exactly what you should expect from an Ed Klein book.”
Kessler, of course, says nothing about Klein’s credibility problems — indeed, he essentially takes credit for being the source for one claim Klein makes, that Obama and Wright had a secret meeting prior to their public split. We’ve previously noted that Kessler considers Klein a “friend,” a personal relationship he does not disclose here.
Needless to say, Kessler sets all of this up to whine yet again that his reporting on Wright was ignored by the “mainstream media” in 2007:
As noted in my story “Media Blackout on Rev. Wright Started in 2007,” for three months during Obama’s primary campaign, the mainstream media ignored Newsmax stories reporting on Rev. Wright’s hate-filled sermons; his denunciations of America, whites, and Israel; and the fact that he gave an award for lifetime achievement to Louis Farrakhan.
By the time the media picked up the stories, Obama was ahead of Hillary Clinton in the primary elections.
According to a Hillary Clinton aide quoted in David Remnick’s “The Ridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” if the media had run the Wright story just two months earlier, Obama’s candidacy “would have been over.”
Perhaps Kessler should get some counseling in order to get over that.