In the hours before Indiana went slightly for Hillary Clinton and North Carolina went big for Barack Obama, John Harwood of the New York Times was also on MSNBC interviewing — guess who — another reporter for the New York Times, John Broder, who’s been traveling with the Clinton campaign. And if you missed them talking to each other you can see it indefinitely on the New York Times video coverage of the MSNBC interview. Today’s incestuous brigade of reporters talking to other reporters on every conceivable venue is the New Journalism, for good or bad.

In this case, Broder seemed to stumble on a bias that African-Americans could certainly find offensive: “He [Obama] too has a great appeal to the faith voter. However, the Jeremiah Wright thing makes him feel a little bit out of the mainstream – that he comes out of a black religious tradition rather than an American more broadly-based church tradition.” Emphasis of course added. But not calling the black religious tradition “American” is certainly looking at the subject through a white prism — just as the casual and constant use of “Christian” to evoke political goodness ignores Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and spiritual people who don’t belong to an organized faith.

Broder also said that “Jeremiah Wright’s performance recently in Washington gave a lot of voters pause — even supporters of Barrack Obama – that maybe we don’t know as much about this phenom as we thought we did.”

But some exit polls seem to show that making so much of the reverend for days on end may have galvanized the black vote as much as it turned off others — as the heavy turnout for Obama by African-Americans revealed.

The exit polls in North Carolina showed Obama getting 37 percent of the white vote, to Clinton’s 61 percent. Of course getting a minority of the white vote is not good enough in the general election and people are looking to see if Obama finds a vice-president who has that appeal (another Billy Bob Clinton?) As race and religion play out in America’s political landscape once again, we will have to see what the next months bring. One wonderful progressive note is that young white people who vote for Obama do not seem bound by the white/black measure of elders. Perhaps the media should be looking more at this.