Washington Post Reporter: If You Ask Us To Call Falsehoods What They Are -- False -- You're "Angry"
December 5, 2007 -- 9:35 AM EST // //
I'm sorry, I'm just not letting this one go. Via Media Matters, Washington Post reporter Peter Baker has stepped up to offer a stout defense of the Post's front-page Obama-is-a-Muslim piece:
The Post ran a story on the front page this week on the whispers about Obama's supposed Muslim faith even though he is a Christian. The reporter wrote the story because a voter in Iowa told him that Obama is a Muslim and he was struck that people remain so ill informed. That sort of misinformation has been common out there and, as the story showed, spread by some people in an attempt to taint Obama. But somehow a story intended to debunk the false claims, trace their origin and explore the challenge they present the campaign in trying to quash them spawned a furious eruption among liberal bloggers accusing the Post of spreading the rumors.Ah, the old "anger" canard -- Baker calls criticism of the piece part of a "contest of outrage."Any reasonable reading of the story makes clear they are not true. Right there in the second paragraph, it says Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago. In other words, a Christian, not a Muslim. And yet the bloggers seem to think readers are so stupid they will actually think the Post is saying the opposite. The story's obvious intent is to clarify, which it did. If people are misinformed about a key aspect of a major presidential candidate to his detriment, then journalism performs a service by addressing misinformation. And if foes are using unfounded rumors to damage a candidate, especially in a subterranean way, then journalism should expose that. Critics can reasonably debate this or that wording in the story, but certainly the intent is clear no matter how much it is distorted on the Web.
What this week shows is that intent is in the eye of the beholder. And the campaign developing over the next 11 months will be filled with more anger, accusation and antipathy.
Judging by the email exchanges I've had with Baker, he's a decent enough guy. So I'm hoping he'll answer the following: If the story was "intended to debunk the false claims," as Baker says, then tell me how exactly the piece did this.
Baker offers a single fact to prove the piece's noble intent: It pointed out in the second graf that "Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ in Chicago." But the problem here is that this doesn't debunk the totality of the smears at all, and Baker's assertion that it does betrays that he isn't acquainted with the basic facts of this case.
The key charge being made here isn't simply that Obama is a Muslim now, but that he has a shadowy Muslim past that he's now trying to cover up by pretending to be a Christian. As the original WaPo piece notes, a key smear email says that Obama is taking great pains to "conceal" that past, adding that "Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim."
Very plainly, the mere mention of the fact that Obama is now a member of this church doesn't debunk this claim in any way. By contrast, the Chicago Tribune did genuinely debunk this last spring by, you know, doing a bunch of reporting and talking to a lot of people from Obama's past.
The second piece of "evidence" the smear offers to bolster the notion that Obama has a shady Muslim past is that he attended a madrassa as a child. This, too, is not debunked in any way by the reference to the current church Obama attends. CNN, by contrast, did in fact debunk this by speaking to a top official at the school.
None of these true media debunkings were mentioned in the WaPo piece. Nor did WaPo do anything like what the Trib and CNN did. Instead it quoted the Obama camp's denials of these smears. Baker above calls the Muslim smears "false." The WaPo piece didn't. Nor did it provide any facts to debunk the key charges about Obama's past in any meaningful way.
Baker's final argument is that bloggers are distorting the piece's true "intent." But that isn't what most of us are doing at all. Who cares what the "intent" was? The main substance of the blogospheric case against the piece concerns not its motives, but its execution. Indeed, the case being made here is really a small part of a much larger challenge many are mounting right now to journalism-as-usual. This isn't about "anger." If something is false, say so -- and provide the facts necessary to contradict it. That's all there is to it.
Comments section temporarily disabled. To reach the homepage of this blog, click here.