I never intended to do more than one post on the bogus right-wing reports accusing Barack Obama of having attended a Madrassa, possibly a terrorist recruiting center, as a six year old. At this point, the story isn’t even about Obama, or even Hillary Clinton who was also smeared as part of the same lie; it’s about the right’s smear machine.
ABC’s Jake Tapper, who talked to Obama about the accusations, asked, “How on earth did we get to this point? Where a United States Senator is explaining that he went to a normal elementary school and not a terrorist recruiting center?” The answer is rather straightforward: a right-wing news source smeared Obama (and Clinton), a bigger right-wing news source amplified that smear, and the mainstream media followed up.
“There’s now almost a predictable process here. People have learned how to get things covered, even when they shouldn’t be covered” said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.
“You either start with a revelation in the Drudge Report or Insight magazine, that then gets picked up by the New York Post or The Wall Street Journal and Fox News and by the blogs, and before long there’s enough noise out there and enough buzz that comes from it that everybody from The New York Times, to The Washington post, to the network news decide they have to cover it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not,” Ornstein added.
In case there was any lingering doubt, the story really is false. CNN debunked the Insight/Fox News reports earlier this week, and ABC News followed up and found the same thing, including the fact that this school has a class on Christianity, with a picture of Jesus and the Lord’s Prayer on the wall. Militant, fundamentalist Islam it is not.
But on the broader point, Tapper explored whether Obama and his aides handled the “controversy,” false and manufactured though it was, properly.
Obama’s team seemed unprepared for that attack, even though it wasn’t entirely new to the senator.
“About three or four months ago, something started surfing around the Web and it was a pretty scurrilous article suggesting not only that I had gone to a Madrassa, but that my family members were Muslim radicals,” Obama said. “And we didn’t make much of it … you can’t control what’s on the Web. What was surprising was that it eventually bubbled up into the mainstream media.” […]
“The Obama camp didn’t know whether to deny this, thereby making it a legitimate issue for every media organization, or whether to ignore it and hope that false rumor would simply go away,” said Larry Sabato, Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. “They actually failed to make a decision promptly, which probably brought them the worst of both worlds.”
I’m not at all convinced this is right. Obama’s team was supposed to “expect” critics to accuse him of attending a terrorist recruiting center as a six year old? Should Obama aides draw up a list of ridiculous accusations, and prepare talking points on all of them, just in case?
Fox News has already backed away from its reporting on this story, saying the network paid “too much credence” to the bogus report. As for Insight, which was responsible for getting this particular smear started, the offshoot of Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times is daring the Clinton campaign to sue them.
Jeffrey Kuhner, editor of Insight Magazine told ABC News that his message to the Clinton campaign is: “Sue us.”
“If he’s so confident that this is a National Enquirer-style made up story,” the editor said, “He and Hillary should sue the pants off us, because if they’re right they could make millions and millions of dollars. But then we’ll depose the investigators who have been conducting the investigation into Obama’s background and they know it. This story is multi-sourced … I have never been more sure of a story in my life.”
Bravado aside, it’s the one thing about Insight’s claim that I can’t wrap my head around. To hear the magazine put it, researchers working for Clinton found “evidence” that Obama has some kind of secret Muslim past. Why, exactly, would Clinton’s researchers share this with Insight, a right-wing publication with very few readers and a tiny circulation? If Clinton’s team wanted to leak a made-up story that could damage their top rival, why on earth wouldn’t they pick a news outlet people actually care about?
I can only hope this is the last we’ll hear of this nonsense, though I have a hunch it isn’t. The point is to get the bogus allegation out there, as broadly as possible, so casual political observers say, “I thought I heard something about Obama being a Muslim and going to some terrorist school….”