Those patriotic folks at Fox News must have hit a brick wall looking for ways to use the July 4th holiday to smear President Obama. So they dredged up some old information about Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, put a new coat of smears on it and called it an “objective news” report. Either that, or someone at Fox has spent the last few weeks scouring David Maraniss’ biography of Obama and finally found some petty discrepancies that are so mild Fox buried the story in a holiday news dump.
On today’s Happening Now, supposedly objective reporter James Rosen (whose bias we have previously noted) reported on what he called “some of the three dozen discrepancies that close readers can find between Dreams from My Father, the bestselling memoir that Mr. Obama (note the lack of the term “President”) published in 1995 and Barack Obama: The Story, the scrupulously-researched history of the president’s ancestry and early life by Pulitzer-Prize winning author and Washington Post editor David Maraniss.”
Got that? You need a “close reader” to find all those discrepancies. Also, it’s worth noting what he didn’t mention: President Obama’s place of birth. If “Pulitzer-Prize winning” Maraniss’ “scrupulously-researched history” of Obama’s ancestry showed that Obama was born in the United States, it pretty much blows a hole through the credibility of a Fox News fave pundit, Donald Trump.
Here’s the big “get” Rosen trumpeted:
Mr Obama has written, for example, about a white girlfriend he had in New York in the early 80’s. That woman, recently identified as Australian native Genevieve Cook, now says Mr. Obama, quote grossly exaggerated some of the details of their experiences together.
But this news is more than two months old. Rosen, himself, even acknowledged later in his report that Obama had already admitted to “compression of characters and other forms of literary license.”
But wait, there’s more – of nothing much. Rosen continued:
“Maraniss also finds for example that contrary to the story told by the future president, it was his mother, Ann Dunham, who left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., a physically volatile bigamist, and not the other way around.”
Once again, this is old news. Maraniss’ book was published on June 19, 2012. Furthermore, in his own introduction, Obama says, on page xvii, that much of his book is based on “contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family.” Given that Obama was about three years old when his parents divorced, chances are he relied on that tidbit from his family. But other than someone eager to point a finger at Obama, does anyone really care who left whom when Obama was a toddler?
In her introduction to Rosen’s report, guest host Arthel Neville acknowledged that Dreams from My Father “was based in part on family mythology,” but neither she nor Rosen bothered to underscore how likely it was that Obama had gotten misinformation from his family rather than deliberately fabricating or sloppily reporting. And even though Maraniss' book came out weeks ago, Rosen seems to have made no effort to find out the source of Obama's misinformation.
In a laughably disingenuous nod at balance, Rosen then played a clip of a Professor Gerald Early defending Obama – as a liar. Early said, “It really doesn’t matter if he made up stuff. I mean, after all, it’s like going to a psychiatrist and you make up stuff and the psychiatrist just can still psychoanalyze you because they’re your lies. So they’re his fabrications. His fabrications say as much about him and what he’s trying to tell you as a writer than if he’s telling you the so-called straightforward truth.”
Shorter Rosen's version of "fair and balanced:" Heads, Obama got his facts wrong in his memoir; tails, his defenders say it’s no big deal that he lied.
Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” like a contrived effort to portray your president as a deceiver!
When you can’t think of new smears, go with the tried and {no pun intended} true.
Next week on Fox: “New information on Tony Rezko — could this derail Obama in November?”
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