Rev. Wright On Bill Moyers

I'll have to check my local listings to see if this airs in my area ...

In a rare interview, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. said media organizations that circulated controversial sound bites of his sermons on the Internet wanted to paint him as "un-American" or "some sort of fanatic" in order to bring down Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ," Wright told journalist Bill Moyers in the first interview he has granted since comments critical of U.S. policies surfaced on television and the Internet.

" 'And by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint, hint, hint?' That's what they wanted to communicate. They know nothing about the church."

[...]

Moyers is a member of Wright's denomination, the United Church of Christ. Excerpts from the interview, conducted this week and airing in the Chicago area at 9:30 p.m. Friday on WTTW-Ch. 11, were released today.

In the interview, Wright told Moyers that people who heard the entire sermons understood his message and those who chose to air the sound bites had a "devious" agenda.

"The persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly," he said. "When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public, that's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from The New York Times called me, a 'wackadoodle.'