In the Politico, Mike Allen tracks the arc of the Rev. Wright story (which had been simmering beneath the surface) as it exploded into the MSM yesterday. And he also clarifies what catapulted it out of the “undernews” [see Mickey Kaus; scroll down] and into the stratosphere.

Unsurprisingly, it was videotape [e.a.]:

Politicians know a troublesome story has “broken through” the Eastern media echo chamber when Jay Leno is laughing at them.

In the case of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., retiring pastor and outgoing spiritual adviser to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), it took less than 48 hours.

The fracas started Thursday morning, when ABC’s “Good Morning America” ran a Brian Ross expose on Wright that included old video of him saying: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America’? No, no, no. Not God bless America. God [expletive] America.”

What Allen meant to say was that it took 48 hours after videotape surfaced for the story to explode. The story of the pastor who hates Whitey and takes every opportunity to announce it had been lying in wait for 20 years—or, more precisely, since January 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy.

And as Allen says, Obama’s opponents had been pushing the press to write about the controversial and inflammatory Wright. To no avail, Allen admits. Not even after ABC broke the story.

Allen suggests that the press failed to jump on (”pile on”) the story after that  out of defiance against the overzealousness of Obama’s opponents:

On Feb. 20, after a fiery guest sermon by Wright in Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran an article that said: “On Tuesday, Wright criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq and likened the insurgents to the Israelites under Babylonian rule.”

At 9:20 that morning, Obama opponents were already trying to get Politico to link to the story.

That’s why many news outlets — including Politico — did not initially pile on with rehashes after Ross’s story on “Good Morning America.”

But that was a reminder that it’s possible for regulars on the trail to be too familiar with the material. With the video widely available in the heat of the race, readers and viewers were thirsty for coverage.

So the public had to demand coverage of this story before the press would tell the wider audience what it knew but failed to reveal.

Very interesting.