The Millionaire’s Media Megaphone — Part Two
How “Fair and Balanced” is Fox News really?
BY Alicia C. Shepard | September 03, 2008
When Illinois Senator Barack Obama secured the Democratic presidential nomination on June 3, becoming the first African-American ever to do so, he and his wife, Michelle, took to the stage in St. Paul, Minnesota. They hugged, and kissed, and then she raised her right hand in a fist and knocked knuckles with her husband in a celebratory gesture familiar to millions of Americans, especially sports fans.
Three days later, that gesture made news on the Fox News Channel program America’s Pulse. Host E.D. Hill promoted an upcoming segment based on the Obamas’ display of affection witnessed around the world: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?” she said to her viewers. “The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We’ll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says.”
But the ensuing segment never actually discussed how the televised fist bump could be interpreted as a terrorist jab or even who — other than Hill — might have suggested that it had sinister overtones. The following Tuesday, after much public outcry, Hill began America’s Pulse with an apology.
“I mentioned various ways the Obamas’ fist pump in St. Paul had been characterized in the media,” she said. “I apologize because unfortunately some thought I personally had characterized it inappropriately. I regret that. It was not my intention. And I certainly didn’t mean to associate the word ‘terrorist’ in any way with Senator Obama and his wife.”
Fox News Channel’s motto is “fair and balanced,” but it has the power to play a politically charged role in the presidential election campaign that is now swinging into high gear. Because Fox News Channel is a one-of-a-kind media phenomenon, the Buying of the President project’s 2008 edition has taken an in-depth look at its role as this political season unfolds.
The 12-year-old channel was too new to have much impact on the 1996 election cycle but had a significant role in the 2000 and 2004 elections — and the current campaign has been feeling its impact since it started. While conservatives frequently complain about The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the major networks, no news outlet draws more scrutiny than Fox.
Perhaps that’s because it’s a new kid on the block and because its founder is the high-profile media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who 1) has long espoused conservative views, 2) is willing to eat millions in losses annually on The New York Post and The Weekly Standard, which both espouse his brand of politics, and 3) hired the long-time Republican communications guru Roger Ailes as the CEO of Fox. Polls show that Fox’s viewers are heavily Republican and conservative.
To many critics, the most telling sign of Fox’s slant is its high-profile, right-leaning pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, even though its news reporting is typically viewed as straightforward. “We are scrupulously balanced during the day,” said Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle, who joined the network in 1996 after working for ABC and CNN. “If you look at political coverage, there is always a Democrat and a Republican together. Or if you’re within one party, you’ll have one campaign’s adviser followed by another campaign’s adviser. There is a scrupulous effort to balance things all through the day.” The pundits come on in primetime.
Ailes rejects the conservative label, even though it’s firmly affixed. “I think conservatives were underserved; that does not make us a conservative channel,” he told the Financial Times in 2006. “I think a lot of conservatives watch our channel; that does not make us a conservative channel. If we are conservative, what does that make the other channels? Liberal. . . . We decided to balance all the arguments and treat the conservative view with the same respect as we have for the liberal view, and that is really irritating some people.”
------------------
Liberals tend to be highly sensitive to what’s said on Fox, charging that Murdoch uses it as an organ of the Republican Party. Despite Fox executives’ denials, support for that perspective keeps turning up, most recently from President Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan.
Appearing this summer on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, McClellan acknowledged that the White House regularly sent “talking points” to commentators at Fox News to ensure that its message gets out. “We at the White House were . . . getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from,” said McClellan. Later the same day MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann said that McClellan had confirmed to him in a telephone interview that this “was done frequently, especially on high-profile issues.” McClellan did stress that the talking points were given to pundits and not to the Fox journalists reporting the news.
The suspicion of bias explains why E.D. Hunt’s gaffe linking Barack Obama to terrorism, and then doing it again in her apology, made news on other channels and networks and set the liberals in the blogosphere howling with charges that Fox intentionally linked the Democrat with terrorism. It was one of a long string of such incidents, and the first of two in just the first two weeks after Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Only days later, on another Fox News program, anchor Megyn Kelly asked conservative blogger Michelle Malkin if going after Michelle Obama is fair game this political season. Malkin defended the right to criticize the senator’s wife. Under Malkin’s image as she spoke, a graphic touted the segment to viewers who might just be tuning in: “Outraged Liberals: Stop Picking on Obama’s Baby Mama.”
“Baby mama” is a slang term used in the African-American community for a woman who has a baby outside of a marriage. “Where do you even start when criticizing Fox’s slur?” asked Joan Walsh in Salon.com, which first spotted the graphic. “Do you try to explain that ‘baby mama’ is slang for the unmarried mother of a man’s child, and not his wife, or even a girlfriend? It’s difficult to imagine a graphic under Senator John McCain’s wife, Cindy, calling her ‘McCain’s Baby Mama.’” This time the apology came from Bill Shine, Fox’s senior vice president for programming.
---------
On average, 1.5 million viewers are watching FNC in primetime, more than CNN and MSNBC combined, but a tiny number compared with the 35 million viewers watching the largest four networks — more than 28 million tuned in to watch a typical episode of American Idol this year. ABC’s popular primetime comedy Two and a Half Men garnered 13.6 million viewers. But the size of Fox News’s influence greatly exceeds the size of its audience. Why?
“The reason cable news gets so much coverage is that all the journalists have the stations on all the time so we are consistently watching what’s going on,” said Eric Deggans, media critic for the St. Petersburg Times in Florida. “The other reason is the audience that watches cable news is a very influential audience. And frankly, the echo chamber of cable can easily spill out to more traditional news and affect their coverage.
“The thing about Fox is framing,” Deggans added. “Fox News Channel is this tribute to the power of framing issues. If you were to take the news stories about Obama, you would see they are about the same as competing channels. But what’s different is the way the anchors frame stories, and lead people into stories, and anchor banter, and transitions, and the graphics. All of those are weighted against Democrats and toward Republicans. What you have is this relatively neutral reporting of news stories framed by a very right-wing Republican point of view.”
Research shows the cable news audience, on the whole, has a bit more money and education than those who watch network news, according to a 2004 study by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Nielsen Ratings show that 1.2 million of Fox News Channel’s typical 1.5 million viewership is 50 or over, an age group likelier to vote than younger people. “It’s probably true that we appeal to white, working-class voters,” FNC’s managing editor Brit Hume said in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year.
While what is said on Fox may reach a small national audience, it often gets repeated on Internet news sites and amplified across the blogosphere, generating controversy that’s picked up by other media including the networks, CNN, MSNBC, and newspapers. In the process, opinions and gaffes that originate on Fox — smears, many critics call them, setting off the controversy — are repeated for much larger audiences, sometimes including The Washington Post or The New York Times. MSNBC discussed E.D. Hill’s “terrorist fist jab” on several of its segments, repeating Hill’s words over and over.
To get an idea of Fox’s impact, it’s instructive to look at a study that got a lot of attention when it came out in 2003. The study, by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, sought to tease out the extent of American misperceptions about why the United States had gone to war with Iraq. The group focused on three common misperceptions, that:
* clear evidence existed that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda.
* weapons of mass destruction were discovered in Iraq.
* world opinion supported the U.S. decision to go to war with Iraq.
The group conducted three different polls in June, July, and August 2003 and found that 80 percent of respondents got their news from television and radio. And it turned out that Fox News Channel viewers had a stronger tendency than others to believe each of the three misconceptions.
* Sixty-seven percent of Fox viewers said the United States has found clear evidence of a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda; none has ever been established.
* Thirty-three percent of Fox viewers believed that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction, when, in fact, they had not.
* Thirty-five percent of Fox watchers said they thought the majority of people in the world favored the United States invading Iraq.
In each of the three categories, Fox News watchers scored the highest compared with those who got their news from CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and print. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions,” the study concluded.
A study in April 2007 by The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press indicated that 71 percent of Americans regularly watch local news, 55 percent turn to newspapers, 46 percent watch the broadcast networks, and 43 percent get their news from Fox — and 39 percent from CNN.
A later Pew study, in August 2007, showed that the American public doesn’t think much of the news media, believing it to be full of bias, inaccuracies, and refusing to admit mistakes. “However, those who cite the Fox News Channel as their primary source of news stand out among the TV news audience for their negative evaluations of news organizations’ practices,” said the study. “Similarly, Fox viewers are far more likely to say the press is too critical of America (52 percent vs. 36 percent of CNN viewers and 29 percent of network news viewers). And the Fox News Channel audience gives starkly lower ratings to network news programs and national newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post.”
Political perspectives, said the study, play a large role in viewers’ opinions. Fox News had twice as many Republicans as Democrats in its audience. It’s the opposite for CNN, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two-to-one.
“Further analysis of the data shows that being a Republican and a Fox viewer are related to negative opinions of the mainstream media,” according to the 2007 study. “Republicans who count Fox as their main news source are considerably more critical than Republicans who rely on other sources. For example, fully 71 percent of Fox News Republicans hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers.”
The study also found that CNN viewers felt much more favorably toward Fox News than did Fox’s viewers toward CNN.
“As far as it being designed for Republicans, one has only to look at the demographics and voting patterns of its viewers to see that Fox News is either accidentally attracting a single group or is actively targeting them,” said Neal Gabler, who regularly criticized the network during the five years he appeared on the channel’s Saturday evening Fox News Watch. “Recently [former Democratic presidential nominee Senator John] Kerry’s pollster, Mark Mellman, determined that the single most Republican cohort outside of self-identifying Republicans was the Fox News viewers. Only 7 percent of them voted for Kerry.”
-------------------
Four years after the launch, Fox News Channel was considered a player on election night 2000. It offered all-night election coverage just as CNN and the three networks did, which meant that each network was paying close attention to state-by-state calls the others were making. This is why in 2000, it was a Fox election night call that would significantly shape the outcome of the down-to-the-wire battle for president between Democrat Albert Gore and Republican George W. Bush.
Much has been written about election night 2000, but what many best remember is how Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS blew it. Election night is showtime for the networks. The story is huge and fast-unfolding, and competition is fierce. With so much on the line, each network prepares extensively, beginning years before the presidential vote. They hire experts, spend lavishly on dazzling graphics, design eye-catching sets, and do more research than a Ph.D. requires. The mission is simple: Get it right.
But they didn’t.
At 7:49 p.m., NBC called Florida as a win for Gore. CBS followed suit one minute later. Fox News Channel, in the presidential projection business for only the second time (they launched in October 1996), chimed in at 7:52 p.m., joined by The Associated Press at 7:53 and CNN at 7:55. The decision came before the polls in Florida’s panhandle (which is in Central Standard Time) were closed. ABC was more cautious, and anchor Peter Jennings waited until 8:02 p.m. to pronounce Gore the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes.
Then came the retractions. Maybe Gore wasn’t the winner. At 9:54 p.m., CBS stripped Gore of his win and sent the race into the undecided column, as did the other networks within about half an hour.
By 1 a.m., it was clear that whoever carried Florida would be the next president of the United States.
At 2:10 a.m. in Fox’s New York studio, election analysts saw the same data that the other networks were scrutinizing. The data indicated (incorrectly, it turned out) that there were only 179,713 outstanding votes. Analysts all knew that Gore would need 63 percent of those to win. It seemed an impossible task.
Enter John Ellis, then 47, head of FNC’s election-decision team and first cousin of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and George W. Bush. His mother is the sister of former President H.W. Bush. Ellis decided it was statistically impossible for Gore to win. He advised the network to call Florida for his cousin.
At 2 a.m., Ellis called his cousins and told them the news. “Their mood was up, big time,” Ellis told The New Yorker in its November 20, 2000, issue. “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth — me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”
So at 2:16 a.m., Fox anchor Brit Hume announced that Bush would be the next president. Fox led the way, and one after the other, the networks tumbled like so many dominoes — CBS and NBC at 2:17 a.m., CNN at 2:18 a.m. And ABC, again last, at 2:20 a.m.
In Nashville, Gore headed toward an audience of his supporters to make a concession speech.
Dan Rather at CBS was bursting with Ratherisms. “Before the trail goes completely cold, let’s give a tip of the Stetson to the loser, Vice President Al Gore,” said Rather, “and at the same time, a bit tip and a hip-hip-hooray and a great big Texas howdy to the new president of the United States. Sip it. Savor it. Cup it. Photostat it. Underline it in red. Press it in a book. Put it in an album. Hang it on the wall. George Bush is the next president of the United States.”
An hour later, Ellis got the same message the other networks got: There was a mistake in the data the networks were analyzing. But by then, the scenario was set: Bush is the presumed winner. Gore is the challenger. But in fact that wasn’t the case at all. The corrected data showed that Florida was simply too close to call. And the country would spend the next month waiting to see who the real winner was.
Fox had only 413,000 primetime viewers in 2000, but everyone was paying attention to the new network nonetheless. Jeff Cohen, author of Cable News Confidential and a former Fox media analyst, believes Fox set the stage in 2000 by its late-night call.
“They had a huge impact in the 2000 election on how the Gore-Bush post-election contest was perceived, not just by the public but by journalists and influencers,” said Cohen, who was a contributor for FNC’s News Watch from 1997 to 2002. “The frame was that Bush is the presumptive winner and Gore is trying to steal something. That was how the media framed it.
“Had the networks all said it was too close to call, the legal battle and the political battle in the ensuing weeks would have been entirely different. The more accurate frame is this election is ‘too close to call,’ which gives more legitimacy to a Democrat challenge to a Republican and less legitimacy to the Republican effort that said, ‘Let’s get this over with.’”
In the 2004 election it would be Fox News Channel, in particular, that joined the drumbeat for a group of Vietnam veterans determined to undermine any chance Democratic Senator John Kerry had of defeating incumbent George W. Bush.
On May 4 the group held a news conference questioning Kerry’s war record in Vietnam, calling Kerry’s character into serious question, and challenging his military expertise, one of his more significant qualifications for the job. They called themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and began running attack ads on August 5 in which 13 veterans said essentially that the Democratic presidential nominee was lying about his military record. They claimed that Kerry had lied to get two of his three Purple Hearts. Over the course of 2004, the majority of the group’s donations came from three wealthy Texan businessmen, each of whom had previously contributed to numerous Republican candidates.
“The group is devoted to calling Kerry’s war record into question, particularly with regard to the length of his tour of duty and the nature of the injuries for which he received three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star,” according to SourceWatch, a site sponsored by the generally liberal Center for Media and Democracy. “It has also questioned claims by Kerry that he was sent on an illegal mission to Cambodia in December of 1968.”
Several different news organizations investigated the Swift Boat veterans’ claims, and they were largely disproved or found to be unsubstantiated. But the damage was done. The perception lingered that Kerry had been dishonest about his war record, and the issue had become so muddled that few were clear on where the truth lay.
Fox News Channel and its managing editor, Brit Hume, jumped onto the Swift Boat veteran’s attack early on. In August 2004, Hume said on Fox News Sunday that the veterans’ book “is a remarkably well-done document. It is full of detail. It is full of specifics. The charges that are being made of Kerry, of irresponsible and indeed in some cases mendacious conduct in his service in Vietnam, are made by people who were there.”
But not every person who was there agreed. None of those in the attack ad actually had served on the boat Kerry commanded, according to factcheck.org, which monitors campaign ads. Army Special Forces Lieutenant Jim Rassmann was there. Kerry, a wounded Swift Boat officer, had plucked him out of the water when they were under attack. Rassmann wrote an account of the rescue in The Wall Street Journal on August 10, 2004. “This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency,” said Rassmann, who identified himself as a Republican. “Their new charges are false; their stories are fabricated, made up by people who did not serve with Kerry in Vietnam.”
Even Kerry’s opponent, George W. Bush, criticized the ads, saying there was no place for them on the air. Fox News said it wouldn’t run one of the ads, but that didn’t stop the network from discussing it. On September 21 and 22, all or some part of the ad was run on six different Fox shows.
Hume didn’t think the issue was getting the traction with the media that it should. In a September 2004 interview with Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, Hume explained why Fox News’s Special Report with Brit Hume had given so much time to the group’s allegations. “We thought it was a totally legitimate story and found it an appalling lapse by many of our competitive news organizations that were treating that story like it was cancerous,” Hume said.
“I think in 2004 Fox played a significant role in the election with the Swift Boat,” said Cohen. “If you have one TV network hammering away and turning a war hero into a wimp and someone who wants to weaken national security, and that network has 2 million viewers in primetime, that can have an impact on a state like Ohio that is evenly divided.”
It’s not just liberals like Cohen who believe the Swift Boat veterans played a key role in doing Kerry in. “President Bush may be celebrating victory today, but he owes it to a group he never acknowledged during the campaign,” said Joseph Farah, editor of right-leaning WorldNetDaily.com on November 3, 2004. “I’m talking about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They are responsible for keeping Bush in the White House — or, more precisely, keeping John Kerry from snatching it from him. There is not a doubt in my mind this was the difference in the race.”
Eric Burns moderated Fox News Watch from 1998 to 2008, watching Fox News grow and stretch. He says the attention that Fox gave the Swift Boat veterans was unprecedented during his tenure. “The degree of repetition that story was on Fox News was astonishing,” said Burns. “I don’t think in all my time there, I don’t remember Fox being as influential on any other story to that extent as it was on the Swift Boat story. I think Fox needed to grab on to this because Bush had an undistinguished first term and he had gotten us into a war. In the early going, you may not recall, but there was no confidence whatsoever that Bush was going to have a second term.”
Kerry’s mistake, he now says, was that he didn’t fight back sooner. “I think the bigger problem was the campaign should have spent more money putting the truth out there,’’ Kerry told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Massachusetts, in November 2007. “I think there was an assumption that it was out there, it was sufficiently out there.’’
-------------------
Barack Obama’s battle with Fox News began long before he became his party’s presumptive nominee. The spark was lit by the online political magazine, Insight, a subsidiary of the right-leaning Washington Times, which is owned by Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. On January 17, 2007, Insight published an article that succeeded, with the help of Fox News, in convincing many people that Obama is Muslim. Here’s how it began:
Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?
This is the question Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Senator Barack Obama.
An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.
“He was a Muslim, but he concealed it,” the source said. “His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign.”
There was not a single named source in the story, but Fox News picked up the allegations nonetheless: A presidential candidate was a Muslim. Rather quickly, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy was asking, “Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised — spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father — as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?”
His co-host Brian Kilmeade responded: “Well, he didn’t admit it. I mean that’s the issue.” Later that day, Fox News host John Gibson repeated the unverified story.
Obama didn’t admit it simply because it was not true. Obama did not attend a madrassa when he was living with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia. In addition, Fox & Friends (unlike the Insight article) confused Obama’s stepfather with his Kenyan-born father, who left the family when Barack Obama was two years old, and so could not and would not have raised his son as a Muslim, in Indonesia or anywhere else.
On January 22, 2007, CNN thoroughly debunked the “Obama is a Muslim” story, even sending a reporter to Jakarta, where he found that the school Obama attended for two years was non-sectarian and certainly not a madrassa.
“All the claims about Senator Obama’s faith and education raised in the Insight magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false,” according to a memo the Obama campaign sent on January 24, 2007. “To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.”
But it was too late. By August 2007, a CBS News poll asked about Obama’s faith. Seven percent of Americans said he was Muslim, and only 6 percent correctly identified him as Protestant. In March 2008, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that 13 percent of registered voters thought Obama was a Muslim. Of course, there would be nothing wrong with Obama being a Muslim. But he’s not, and critics believe that Fox News and other conservative news outlets subtly push that idea because there’s still a great deal of prejudice against Muslims in America.
“Our data shows that only 34 percent of Americans say that they have no prejudice against Muslims,” Dalia Mogahed, of the Gallup polling organization, told NPR in April. “That figure compares to 74 percent who say they have no prejudice against Jews. So while anti-Semitism is certainly not a relic of the past, anti-Muslim sentiment is at an alarmingly high rate right now in America, and because of that it’s used as a political tool against politicians.”
The power of the falsehood about Obama’s religion is a potent example of how Fox News affects today’s media ecosystem, and why a network with a relatively small viewership remains a key player in a system that feeds the mainstream media. Hundreds of stories about Fox News incorrectly reporting that Obama was a Muslim were reported by mainstream outlets.
Fox News also occasionally and gratuitously refers to Obama by his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, which is, of course, accurate, but use of his middle name subtly feeds the idea that Obama is a Muslim since the name Hussein is both tied to Saddam Hussein and is as common in Arab countries as Jones is in the United States.
* On January 27, 2008, on FNC’s Hannity’s America, guest Bill Cunningham, a conservative radio host, repeatedly called him Barack Hussein Obama.
* On February 26, Cunningham, on Hannity & Colmes, used Obama’s middle name seven times.
* On June 9, Steve Doocy said on Fox & Friends: “Meanwhile, the John McCain campaign has already said, look, Barack Obama is a guy who throughout history has raised taxes. Under a Barack Hussein Obama administration, you will wind up with higher taxes.”
On March 16, 2008, Fox News Sunday’s host Chris Wallace, in an attempt to embarrass Obama into being on his show, began an on-air countdown clock that displayed the hours, minutes, and seconds that had elapsed since Obama had promised to appear on his show. On April 26, a persistent Wallace got his interview.
“And hello again from Fox News in Washington,” began Wallace on the next morning’s show. “Well, as most of you know, six weeks ago we started something called the ‘Obama Watch,’ the amount of time that had passed since the senator promised me he would come on Fox News Sunday. It has been 772 days, but now it’s time to stop the clock. Yesterday, we traveled to Indiana for an exclusive “Choosing the President” interview with the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. We caught up with Obama after a rally at a high school in Marion, Indiana.”
The hour-long interview ended with Wallace telling Obama, “Don’t be a stranger.”
Fox News has continued to occasionally question Obama’s patriotism, questioning why he didn’t wear an American flag pin, even though the other presidential candidates often didn’t, and questioning whether he puts his hand over his heart when singing “The Star Spangled Banner” — an issue that failed to dog any other Democratic or Republican candidate. Obama, by his actions, including his explanation that wearing a flag pin had become “a substitute for . . . true patriotism,” had arguably raised these questions, but Fox seemed especially eager to pursue them.
And Fox News seems unwilling to try to dispel the notion that Obama is a Muslim. On June 16, 2008, Hume, a longtime former ABC reporter, said on his show Special Report, that Malik Obama, the senator’s half brother in Kenya, had told The Jerusalem Post that “if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people, despite his Muslim background.”
But that turns out not to be true, according to Jake Tapper of ABC News. Tapper listened to Malik Obama’s interview with Israel Army Radio, the actual source for The Jerusalem Post story. In the interview, Malik said, “I don’t think Israel should worry too much, you know, about the connection, because I am a Muslim myself, and I don’t think that my being a Muslim has got anything to do with my brother being the president of the United States.”
“It may be that the Israeli Army Radio interviewer asked about Obama having a ‘Muslim background,’” Tapper wrote on his blog, which fact-checks political information. “But even if the interviewer did, Malik did not say that or come close to saying that. It could be that the interviewer used the phrase, and Malik interpreted that in a way that squares with the Obama campaign’s story — that Obama’s father was a largely secular man born Muslim. We don’t know. But nowhere in there does Malik expressly say anything about Obama having a Muslim background.”
Despite all the controversy, even the Democrats still seem intent on engaging Fox News and its viewers. Following a meeting with Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes earlier this summer, Barack Obama is scheduled to appear on The O’Reilly Factor this Thursday, September 4.