Prometheus 6

To make the story worth Page 1, there needed to be new, credible information. No one from Iowa or New Hampshire, where Obama has been campaigning heavily, was quoted. More reporting or waiting for a news peg for the story would have helped. A perfect peg would have been the Hillary Clinton campaign's dismissal of a volunteer last week in Iowa for forwarding an e-mail saying Obama is a Muslim. Hamilton said, "I don't think rumors like this will die. Obama is going to have a problem with them as long as he's a candidate."...

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....

Pause for effect...

Hamilton said, "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."

...and your explanations disingenuous, yes. Too many lies told with a straight typeface over the years, too many after the fact stories about things we know you know (see: Plame, Valerie), to give you media guys the benefit of the doubt.

Refuting, or Feeding, the Rumor Mill?
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B06

Stories about rumors are tricky and easily misconstrued. A Nov. 29 story and headline that explored Barack Obama's "connections to the Muslim world" and rumors that he is Muslim were met with a swift Internet reaction that left some staffers stunned at its ferocity. Even Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles was "so upset" that he took the unusual step of taking potshots at the story in an editorial page cartoon.

My problems with the story by National Desk political reporter Perry Bacon Jr. and the headline ("Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him") were that Obama's connections to Islam are slender at best; that the rumors were old; and that convincing evidence of their falsity wasn't included in the story.

But there was no deliberate "smear job," as some readers charged. The story said clearly in the second paragraph that Obama is a member of a United Church of Christ congregation in Chicago.

That wasn't good enough for many readers, liberal Web sites and the Obama campaign. Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, said the story was "egregious. I thought the story was a great way to perpetuate a rumor or innuendo without the simple act of saying it was wrong." Gibbs said the story should have said flatly that Obama is a Christian. "This is an ascertainable, knowable and irrefutable fact." Gibbs said that "one half of the story was a billboard for the rumors."

"This was a legitimate subject for journalism explored by one of our most sophisticated political reporters," said Managing Editor Philip Bennett. "We should have been clearer about what it did and didn't say -- in the headline, through the display and in the body of the piece."

Bacon referred a request for comment to Bill Hamilton, assistant managing editor for politics. Hamilton edited the story, which several top editors saw before it was published. "I'm sorry it was misunderstood," he said. "It obviously makes me think about how I edited it. It seemed to me the story made clear that Obama was not a Muslim but that the campaign was having trouble contending with people spreading that rumor. I thought that in this context saying it was a rumor meant it wasn't true, but clearly some people didn't see it the same way. The Post has a responsibility to confront seemingly credible rumors and that was one of the reasons for the story."