by Frank James
The blogs are ablaze today over the Washington Post’s front-page story over how Sen. Barack Obama’s personal ties to Islam (his paternal grandfather was a Muslim as was his Indonesian stepfather) have been mischaracterized by his political enemies to falsely accuse the Democratic presidential candidate of being a Muslim. (He’s a Christian who belongs to one of black Chicago’s best-known churches.)
The piece by Perry Bacon Jr. is straightforward journalism. It reports the reality—that Obama is the subject of false charges regarding his religion—and that Obama himself hasn’t been shy on the campaign trail about bringing up the fact that he lived in an Islamic country, Indonesia, for a while as a youth or his grandfather’s religion.
Nevertheless, the Post and Bacon are being excoriated on liberal blogs like Digby’s Hullabaloo and the Carpetbagger Report today for essentially reporting the truth. The heart of the beef with the Post’s Bacon appears to be that the article didn’t call the false charges that Obama is Muslim outright lies but referred to them as “rumors.”
By not unequivocally calling the charges lies, Bacon’s article furthers the scurrilous allegations that Obama is a Muslim, say his critics. You see, calling the allegations rumors may allow some easily confused people to believe they are actually true.
To the partisan bloggers angry that Bacon and the Post didn’t use the words “lie” or “liars”, please know that MSM types don’t typically go around calling people liars. We leave that to well, partisan bloggers.
Even during the campaign season when we do fact-checks on political ads, we don’t say that someone has lied. We say the facts don’t support the claim.
What we do is we report in order to gather facts. We then marshal those facts to tell a story. We hope the story is interesting enough to draw readers’ attention. In this, Bacon and the Post have clearly succeeded.
We also hope those facts will allow readers to draw their own conclusions. And usually, from the way we select and arrange the facts, you can tell what conclusions we think should be drawn.
One big fact that Bacon’s piece provides early on gives the lie, as it were, to the charge that Obama is a Muslim.
High up in the second paragraph, the story says that Obama is a member of a United Church of Christ in Chicago. That should pretty much end the discussion since you can search high and low and you’d still be hard pressed to find a Muslim who’s a member of a Protestant church. That would be a two-way blasphemy.
Anyone who truly understands what it means to belong to a Christian church, should have no doubts about what the story’s saying from the very start about Obama’s Christianity. It is saying there’s this key fact that screams out he is a practicing Christian.
As for the use of the word “rumor,” that word can be used to describe allegations that have no basis in fact, that have no proof or evidence behind them. It applies to the sort of charges made in whispering campaigns.
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Or push polls, like those used by those still mysterious people in South Carolina in 2000 who said Sen. John McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock.
By the way, the MSM generally didn’t refer to those nasty 2000 rumors against that Republican past and present presidential candidate as lies either. What we did was we reported the facts that yes, McCain did have a dark-skinned child but that she was adopted from an orphanage abroad.
We let the facts paint the picture, just as Bacon and the Post did in this case.