CBS: Obama Is "Dogged By Muslim Rumors"
November 29, 2007 -- 1:29 PM EST // //
Just to give you a sense of how the damage can spread from a story like the ridiculous front page Washington Post piece today recycling "rumors" about Obama being a Muslim, let's take a look at the front page of CBS News' web site, which is now featuring the WaPo story as its lead:
You really have to love the guilty-looking, deer-in-the-headlights photo CBS packaged this story with here.
Look -- Obama is not "dogged by Muslim rumors." He is the victim of a smear campaign based on lies. These two things are not the same. And incidentally, to whatever extent Obama is "dogged" by these rumors, surely this will only be facilitated when news orgs like WaPo fail to make a serious effort to knock them down before printing them.
Just to be clear, CBS probably wouldn't be running with this headline if WaPo hadn't done such a bad job on today's story. It portrayed the "rumors" as being still in dispute, rather than labeling them false, and it told readers that they had only been denied by Obama and his advisers without noting that a central piece of the smear -- that he attended a madrassa -- had been called out as false by a top official at the school he attended. If the people at CBS had done a bit of googling, however, they would have learned this stuff -- and probably wouldn't have slapped this bogus headline on their front page.
It's probably too late for WaPo to fix this in any significant way. But the Post ombud could still take a good hard look at this. And as I noted below, if she doesn't, a lot of folks will be very irked, and justifiably so.
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