To date, the traditional media’s coverage of the Democratic presidential candidates has been discouraging, to put it mildly. CNN ran a segment comparing Obama to Ahmadinejad because the senator wasn’t wearing a tie in New Hampshire. The Washington Post ran a bizarre front-page story about John Edwards selling his house. Reports about Hillary Clinton have ranged from silly to bizarre.
But to follow up on news from last week, the reports about Obama and the Indonesian school he attended as a six year old have been uniquely, breathtakingly stupid. To briefly recap, some of the more hysterical elements of the conservative movement would have us believe that Obama has secret “Muslim heritage,” may have been taught radical Wahhabism, and may be disloyal to the United States. This obvious nonsense was picked up by Insight (a magazine produced by Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times), Fox News, the New York Post, the Chicago Sun Times’ Mark Steyn, CNN’s Glenn Beck, and several of the less-responsible members of the far-right blogosphere.
In a pleasant surprise, real news outlets are not only treating this story with skepticism, they’re actually doing what the mainstream media is usually loath to do: they’re debunking the story and telling the public the truth.
The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz took on the story yesterday in a fact-checking piece, and CNN did a lengthy segment yesterday setting the record straight.
:[R]eporting by CNN in Jakarta, Indonesia and Washington, D.C., shows the allegations that Obama attended a madrassa to be false. CNN dispatched Senior International Correspondent John Vause to Jakarta to investigate. He visited the Basuki school, which Obama attended from 1969 to 1971.
“This is a public school. We don’t focus on religion,” Hardi Priyono, deputy headmaster of the Basuki school, told Vause. “In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don’t give preferential treatment.”
Vause reported he saw boys and girls dressed in neat school uniforms playing outside the school, while teachers were dressed in Western-style clothes.
“I came here to Barack Obama’s elementary school in Jakarta looking for what some are calling an Islamic madrassa … like the ones that teach hate and violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Vause said on the “Situation Room” Monday. “I’ve been to those madrassas in Pakistan … this school is nothing like that.”
The good news is CNN and the WaPo have exposed a ridiculous right-wing smear job. The bad news is the misguided attack dogs aren’t done.
In a response that appears to have been written by a child, Insight magazine ran an item explaining that the “liberal media establishment is at it again. For years, they have been carrying water for liberal Democrats.” Those are literally the first two sentences in the piece, which lets the reader know about the tenor of the editorial.
It’s filled with cheap shots, factual errors, and logical fallacies — too many to list here, but read the piece and see for yourself — but here’s the real gem:
Prior to our story being published, we contacted the Obama camp for comment. They had none…and were petrified about the story. Only when FOX and several national radio talk show hosts jumped on the story, did they issue their denials. We stung the Obama people by doing what journalists should do: follow the truth, no matter where it leads.
As near as I can tell, Insight wasn’t trying to be funny; it just turned out that way.
For conservative blogs, there seems to be a delineation between the hinged and unhinged. Ed Morrissey wrote, “It seems more than a little irrelevant what kind of school in which his parents enrolled him when he counted his age in single digits. Obama has not lived his life as a Muslim but as a Christian, and received most of his education in American public schools. (Maybe we should be questioning that.) He isn’t a stealth Muslim regardless of his middle name or his two-year attendance in a school in Indonesia.”
And then there’s Dan Riehl, who argues “a few questions may still remain.” Like what?
No question Obama likes to push himself as a man of God now:
“Obama is especially proud of being a husband and father of two daughters, Malia, 8 and Sasha, 4. Obama and his wife, Michelle, married in 1992 and live on Chicago ’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.
“Barack Obama was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.”
But he tried to make himself appear as just the opposite in one of his recent books:
“In Indonesia, I’d spent 2 years at a Muslim school, 2 years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I’d pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.”
I don’t care so much about what he is or isn’t. But I detest people who want it both ways.
In other words, as Riehl sees it, if Obama wasn’t religious as a six-year-old child, but then became a church-going Christian as an adult, he’s trying to have it “both ways.” Wow.
In any case, kudos to CNN and Kurtz for actually following up on a hatchet job and telling the public the facts. At this point, there are a number of far-right media voices who owe Obama and their readers/viewers an apology.