Topic: Accuracy in Media
In a Feb. 1 Accuracy in Media column, Cliff Kincaid is eager to defend InsightMag.com for its article that promoted the false claim that Barack Obama attended an extremist Islamic madrassa as a child. Kincaid insisted that the story "cannot be easily dismissed" because Obama's purported Muslim past remains "mysterious" and the CNN report debunking the claim was "hastily-produced and superficial." He added:
Some "progressives" want the public to believe that the story has been proven to be a lie, smear, or hoax. But that is not the case. It is the case that "progressives" want to use this controversy to make conservative media pay for running the story.
But in 2004, Kincaid did exactly that to CBS' Bush-National Guard story -- dismiss it completely because one part was found questionable -- even though many of the allegations raised in the report were not affected by the questionable sourcing of those memos -- and used it to further AIM's attacks on the "liberal media."
For instance, a Sept. 21, 2004, column calimed that CBS was "caught in the middle of a criminal conspiracy, with links to the Kerry campaign, to use forged documents to bring down an American president." But in his column on the Insight article, Kincaid does not note the prediction of The New Republic's Jason Zengerle, made more than a month before the Insight article appeared, that conservatives will "launch a savage and despicable whispering campaign" against Obama "and then blame it all on Hillary" -- a description that fits the Insight story to a T.
More examples:
- A Sept. 30, 2004, column called the report "discredited" and accused CBS' Dan Rather of "going to any length to smear the President of the United States."
- An Oct. 1, 2004, column asserted that the report "has all the earmarks of a Democratic Party operation, masquerading as 'news,' in order to evade legal limits on contributions to the John Kerry campaign."
- A Nov. 15, 2004, column called the CBS report "phony."
- A Feb. 16, 2005, AIM Report called the report "discredited" and "bogus."
Nowhere to our knowledge has AIM examined every claim made in the CBS report in detail to determine the accuracy of each and what evidence exists to support them. Yet Kincaid declares a debunking of an obvious flaw in the Insight report as "superficial." Not exactly a shining example of seeking "accuracy in media."
