WaPo ombudsman rips WaPo “Obama is a Muslim” story but fails to fully correct it
posted at 7:46 pm on December 8, 2007 by Bryan
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And still manages to leave a couple of major errors uncorrected. With a track record like this, we’re sure to hear any day now that they’ve hired Jim Henley to verify quotes.
In the past couple of weeks I’ve written three posts about this story, two since it was published. One, two, three. In the second, I highlighted an error that Post reporter Perry Bacon made with regard to a quote from a Robert Spencer article. In that article, Spencer debunked the rumor that Barack Obama is or ever was a Muslim. If the Post really did its homework, it would have also found this Jihad Watch that Robert wrote on the subject, in which he said of the rumor:
That’s a lot of hooey.
Here’s a visual aid that I created the day we produced the show.
If “That’s a lot of hooey” is too technical a phrase for the Post, I’ll help out. It means that Robert Spencer does not believe in the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In Spencer’s article on the subject, there appears the following passage.
Given Obama’s politics, it will not be hard to present him internationally as someone who understands Islam and Muslims, and thus will be able to smooth over the hostility between the Islamic world and the West — our first Muslim President.
Pulled out of context, that paragraph could reasonably lead a reader to conclude that Spencer believes Obama is a Muslim and that that might be politically useful to him. But. It’s clear from the rest of the article that Robert Spencer does not believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim, only that some on the left and within Islamic groups like CAIR might see political reasons to present him as one to the rest of the world. He would therefore be the first “Muslim president” in the sense that Bill Clinton was the first “black president.” Which is also, by the way, a lot of hooey. On his own blog after the Bacon article first appeared, Spencer had this to say.
Was I saying in this that Obama would, if elected, be our first Muslim President in a literal sense? Clearly not. I was saying he could be our first Muslim President the way Bill Clinton was our first black President. The whole first part of the column is about his not being a Muslim, and what the implications of that were in light of revelations in a Los Angeles Times piece that I linked at the beginning of the column.
But in the original Post article by Mr. Bacon, here’s how Spencer’s paragraph was used.
Human Events, another conservative magazine, published on its Web site a package of articles called “Barack Obama Exposed.” One of them was titled “The First Muslim President?”
Robert Spencer, a conservative activist, wrote in Human Events that “given Obama’s politics, it will not be hard to present him internationally as someone who understands Islam and Muslims, and thus will be able to smooth over the hostility between the Islamic world and the West — our first Muslim President.”
Conservative talk-show hosts have occasionally repeated the rumor, with Michael Savage noting Obama’s “background” in a “Muslim madrassa in Indonesia” in June, and Rush Limbaugh saying in September that he occasionally got “confused” between Obama and Osama bin Laden. Others repeatedly use the senator’s middle name, Hussein.
Used that way, Bacon makes the paragraph give readers the impression that Spencer believes that Obama may be a crypto-Muslim even though the paragraph came from an article that asserts the opposite. Thereby, he’s attaching the rumor to conservative activists and to Spencer in particular. But Bacon has flipped the original meaning of the paragraph so that it means the opposite of what Spencer’s original article intended. Bacon also mischaracterizes Rush Limbaugh’s “confusion” on the matter, which is a schtick that references Sen. Ted Kennedy’s actual confusion on one occasion, when he mistakenly called Obama “Osama.” Visual aid number two.
But with all the new writing on this story from the Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, these errors remain uncorrected. She takes on the critics from the left who argued that the Bacon story didn’t include enough information about the rumor’s debunking, which is a fair criticism of the story. She dishes a little criticism back to them while mostly taking their views to heart. But she ignores the criticism from the right, that Bacon misused a quote from Robert Spencer’s article. Instead of correcting that error as well as Bacon’s mischaracterization of Rush Limbaugh’s “confusion,” we get this howler.
Bacon’s story said that the rumors “echoed on Internet message boards and chain e-mails” and that talk-show hosts “occasionally” repeated the rumors. The story also brought up a discredited Jan. 16 story in Insight magazine, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times. The Insight story said that Obama had gone to a madrassa, an Islamic religious school, as a child. CNN, ABC-TV and the Associated Press went to the school and reported that it was not a religious school but a public school. Bacon’s story should have noted that information, which was also reported at the time by Post media writer Howard Kurtz. The Insight story was criticized in a Jan. 28 Post editorial.
What, exactly, does Rev. Moon have with anything in this saga? It’s clear to me from that paragraph that Howell is attempting to dismiss critics on the right by attaching the only ones she mentions to the Moonies. Nice.
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Andy Young and Hillary’s campaign county chairs are are trolling internet message boards and sending chain-emails, too? Who’d a thought?
Dusty on December 8, 2007 at 8:14 PM
Moonies, Mormons and Muslims, oh my!
Tzetzes on December 8, 2007 at 8:26 PM
And they accuse critics of the Koran of cherry-picking!
Tzetzes on December 8, 2007 at 8:30 PM
Everyone in Hawaii knows that Obama is not a Muslim.
pat on December 8, 2007 at 8:33 PM
Obama is a featherweight.
Whose father was a Muslim.
Some Muslims may then consider him a potential “revert”, and secretly sympathetic to his father’s faith.
But it’s his being a featherweight that makes him a pointless candidate at this moment in history.
He needs to read Herodotus, Thucydides, etc., etc., etc., up to Churchill- and even Bernard Lewis’ “What Went Wrong” [with Islam] - and gain some sense of the historical perspective of the despotic Persian Empire versus the democratic West in order to properly grasp the stakes we face, and to defend our Civilization against the assaults of resurgent Islamic imperialism, which incarnates this same, ancient tyrannical impulse.
Barack probably thinks Marcus Aurelius is a boxer or a running back.
And that Istambul never had a different name.
Featherweight.
profitsbeard on December 8, 2007 at 9:26 PM
Or a 70s-80s character on the soap One Life to Live.
baldilocks on December 8, 2007 at 9:34 PM
Well said!
Bryan,those who deny ALL Obama’s ties to Islam are also mistaken.
Ex-tex on December 8, 2007 at 9:59 PM
The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, hmmm, isn’t she suppose to be a professional journalist with ethics??
Zorro on December 8, 2007 at 10:08 PM
Bingo!
Just would like to point out:
Barack Hussein Obama had a Muslim father and a Muslim stepfather.
That makes him a double-revert muslim.
BTW, who is this Herodotus and what kind of inside dope does he have on Barack Hussein Obama?
billy on December 8, 2007 at 10:08 PM
Well said yourself.
People like Robert Spencer can deny the truth all they want, but someone has to wake the sheeple up to the Islamofascists and their allies in the Dhimmicrat party.
billy on December 8, 2007 at 10:14 PM
Wouldn’t be surprised if there is one. Check out this player’s name.
mikeyboss on December 8, 2007 at 10:43 PM
Prediction: Obama, as President or Vice President, has a revelation and converts to Islam, spouting about the faith of his fathers.
rockdalian on December 8, 2007 at 11:09 PM
Right on brother man!11!
He’ll be exposed as the double-black-muslim-revert that he is.
billy on December 8, 2007 at 11:17 PM
Little billy billy won’t
Go home
But you can’t keep billy down
billy must troll
hillbillyjim on December 9, 2007 at 12:45 AM
For the yoots out there, this will help explain my last comment.
hillbillyjim on December 9, 2007 at 12:57 AM
Bingo!
I’d like to thank everybody who insists on using Obama’s middle name for making billy’s trolling possible. And billy - lame, dude. Watch a few episodes of Red State Update to see how to properly (and hilariously) parody right-wingers.
RightOFLeft on December 9, 2007 at 1:03 AM
Get help.
hillbillyjim on December 9, 2007 at 1:16 AM
Gold.
hillbillyjim on December 9, 2007 at 1:22 AM
The only way anyone can ever attempt to defeat Robert Spencer’s position is to outright misrepresent the words he has said and the words he has written.
In this day and age, when the audio/visual proof, along with the internet record of the written word, is actually ever debunked by those who attempt to refute Spencer’s position, I will eat my hat.
The truth that Robert puts forth is irrefutable, especially coming almost solely from basic event news and Islamic sources.
I expect to have this hat a long time.
awake on December 9, 2007 at 1:36 AM
Everybody knows Marcus Aurelius is that singer dude who married J Lo.
abinitioadinfinitum on December 9, 2007 at 2:13 AM
Brah, who?
Kini on December 9, 2007 at 4:35 AM
I also find it curious that while attending muslim schools as a child he went by the name “Barry”. Now that he declares himself a Christian, he uses the identity Obama.
heroyalwhyness on December 9, 2007 at 8:30 AM
Open comment to the Hotair powers that be:
Please God, could you all MAN UP just a little bit. All this ENDLESS pansy hand wringin’ over folk’s questioning of Mitt’s Mormonism and Obama’s Islam connections is makin’ me sick to my stomach!
THESE PEOPLE WANT TO BE THE LEADER OF THE FREE WORLD!!! They chose to RUN. We can ASK ‘em anything we want.
STOP BEIN’ THE CONSERVATIVE PC POLICE! It’s embarrassing. We conservatives are the ones who WANT FREE SPEECH! Even if it OFFENDS somebody.
STOP TELLIN’ US What we CAN and CAN’T say, or read, or think. We’re (for the most part) adults and can filter information for ourselves.
Ex-tex on December 9, 2007 at 9:36 AM
Who is telling you what you can or cannot say, read, or think? You can say as many idiotic things as you want!
You seem to be complaining that you can’t just make foolish comments without being taken to task for them.
Now perhaps you can explain what your fixation with non-existent censorship has to do with the fact that WaPo really screwed up this story.
Buy Danish on December 9, 2007 at 10:47 AM
Am I misguded when I see a cleverly deniable smear campaign here? Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but this entire discussion in which everybody assures everybody else that they know Obama is Christian sounds like this from a distance:
Every word is true, every word is fully defendable, yet the whole discussion casts a crescent-shaped shadow over the candidate.
I’m looking forward to a similar discussion over at Kos along these lines:
- It is a shame that some accuse Giuliani of being gay.
- Not that there is anything wrong with that.
- The New York Times never accused Giuliani of being gay, they’ve just shown pictures of him cross-dressed as a drag
queerqueen, surrounded by a number of homosexuals.- But that doesn’t mean Giuliani is gay.
- After all he has had a number of allegedly female wives.
- And the line between gay and straight tends to be a little blurred in New York.
- We could say Giuliani is gay in the sense that he is friendly, upbeat and happy.
- I’m not saying that Giuliani is gay, but is America ready for a gay president?
- Regardless of Giuliani’s impressive qualifications, would you vote for a gay man running for president?
- Those firefighters Rudy likes to have himself photographed with, they sure are hot!
factoid on December 9, 2007 at 12:02 PM
Okay for you simple minded folk let me put it a different way-
Obama’s father WAS a muslim.
Obama DID attend a muslim school for 5 years as a child.
Obama’s middle name is Hussein.
THOSE ARE FACTS. THEY ARE NOT SMEARS.
Mitt Romney is Mormon.
THAT is a FACT. It is NOT a SMEAR.
You folks need to grow up and learn to tell the difference.
Politics is a rough game. NOBODY has a right to CALL ANYBODY OUT for SMEARIN’ SOMEBODY when all they did was point out facts.
You don’t like the FACTS- too da*n bad. You can draw yer own CONCLUSIONS but DON’T TRY TO CENSOR THE FACTS BASED ON SOME RIDICULOUS NOTION OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.
Ex-tex on December 9, 2007 at 12:42 PM
First of all, no one has “censored” you or anyone else, so you are imagining things in that regard.
Secondly, the topic of this thread is not whether or not Obama is a Muslim, and it certainly has nothing to do with Mitt Romney. The topic is WaPo’s reporting of this story, where they misstated Robert Spencer’s position and smeared Rush Limbaugh - among other egregious errors.
Why you are SCREAMING and RANTING is a mystery that I am not in a position to solve.
Buy Danish on December 9, 2007 at 5:58 PM