Topic: WorldNetDaily
While WorldNetDaily is obsessing over an attempted eBay auction of a purported Barack Obama birth certificate from Kenya -- a picture of which the seller won't even post, let alone offer any independent, credible authentication of the purported document -- yet another fact-checker has proven another WND allegation regarding the certificate wrong.
A July 1 PolitiFact.com item examines an allegation by WND, in league with the Western Journalism Center, that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs lied when he told WND's Les Kinsolving in a White House press briefing that Obama's birth certificate is posted on the Internet:
WorldNetDaily.com, through an owner The Western Center for Journalism, responded with an ad in the conservative publication Human Events, in which they called Gibbs' response arrogant, factually incorrect, lies.
Moreover, the ad said, "members of the liberal elitist media...instead of pressing Gibbs on his outrageous statements...openly laughed."
The ad is right about that, journalists could clearly be heard chuckling at Kinsolving's questions.
The question here is, did Gibbs lie?
You already know the answer: no. FactCheck recounts the factual evidence that shoots down WND's assertions, then concludes:
So back to the claim that Gibbs lied about posting Obama's birth certificate on the Internet. WorldNetDaily is correct that the Obama campaign didn't post his original birth certificate on the Internet. But their suggestion that there is some significant difference between the two documents is wrong. They both prove the same thing. Maybe the original would identify the hospital where Obama was born, but that's irrelevant. The issue is what city, and therefore country, was he born. The document posted by the campaign proves Obama was born in Honolulu, according to Health Department officials. And that's really the central issue here.
The Health Department says the "Certification of Live Birth" is Hawaii's version of a birth certificate. Calling it by other names - Certificate of Live Birth, Certification of Live Birth - is just semantics. WorldNetDaily may be right that the original birth certificate wasn't posted, but if Hawaii says the the document Obama posted can rightly be called Obama's birth certificate, how is Gibbs lying? We harbor no delusions that anything we say here will slow the persistent drumbeat of the birthers, but we rule this statement False.
Will WND respond to this, or will it pretend it doesn't exist and hide it from its readers, as it has the numerous previous debunkings of its claims?
