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Why All the Birther Attention Now?
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Issue
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| Contributor | Jason |
| Last Edited | Jason Aug 04, 2009 05:34pm |
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| Category | Editorial |
| Author | David Paul Kuhn |
| News Date | Friday, July 31, 2009 11:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Am I the only one who finds it odd that the media is paying exponentially more attention to the "birther" issue today than during the campaign? There was reason to ignore conspiracy theories during the campaign. There were a great deal of lies flying around about Barack Obama in 2007 and 2008 (there were a few flying around about John McCain and Sarah Palin as well).
But the treatment of the "birthers" is peculiar. I went on Nexis and did a search of the broad "news" category of the phrase: "birth certificate" and Obama. In the past month there were 564 pieces on the subject (302 in the past week alone!). That is more than half of all the pieces on the subject written before Election Day 2008, which totaled 1,051. Major broadcast outlets from MSNBC to National Public Radio have devoted hours of coverage to the subject in the past week.
I don't think the subject should have been covered more during the campaign. But it's hard to argue that the media should be covering it more now. One cannot overestimate how many activist conservative blogs were blowing up with this issue in 2008, and the media largely did not cover it.
Some backstory. Before the birth certificate issue was substantially fact checked by a major media outlet, one of my editors and I noticed how much this issue was in the blogosphere. Being that I was the chief political writer for CBSnews.com during "Memogate" or "Rathergate"--when conservative bloggers correctly called out false memos critical of President George W. Bush and featured on "60 Minutes"--I'd witnessed the costs of ignoring blogosphere outcries the hard way. By 2008, I worked for Politico, and early on I went to the library to verify whether there was some birth announcement (it was there). So I explored the issue, and so did other reporters. Politico never did the story during the campaign because there was no story. |
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