Punish the Right-Wing Liars

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted January 31, 2007.

"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?" -- From Hannity.com, long after the "madrassa" story had been debunked

Nearly two years before the next presidential election, we've already set the tone: Even the most outrageous media fictions about candidates are apparently going to go unpunished.

At least that was my thought, after watching last week's unfolding of the Obama-madrassa scandal -- the unofficial starting gun for the Great Slime Race, as the 2008 presidential campaign will someday be known. I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.

For some reason, however, we never see full-blown libel suits in high-level political journalism. Moreover, there appears to be a completely different standard for talk-radio and TV talk-show hosts, who are somehow allowed to lie and fuck up with impunity, and still remain employed. I get the feeling that as a society we have decided to give a collective pass to serial media swindlers like Sean Hannity simply because we never expect them to actually document the "facts" that come spewing in mass volumes out of their zoster-covered mouths every day. We actually expect them to pull most of their material out of their asses, and are mostly content to address the problem by pompously correcting their errata post-factum in whiny media-crit outlets like...well, like this one. Actual real punishment never seems to be forthcoming.

The Obama incident was a perfect example. After Fox outlets, Insight magazine and the Roger Ailes morning vehicle Fox and Friends erroneously reported that a source in "Hillary Clinton's camp" had uncovered that Barack Obama had been schooled in a "madrassa" in his youth in Indonesia, CNN dispatched a reporter to the school in question and found that the tale was totally false, that there were religion classes only once a week at the school and that the school had not even a hint of Wahabbite influence. Moreover, Hillary Clinton's camp denied having anything to do with the story. "They made it up," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said.

Fox responded with a classic "Eat me you clowns!" send-off, with Fox anchor John Gibson bitching that John Vause, the CNN reporter who blew up their report, "probably went to the very [same] madrassa." Ultimately there was a reluctant "retraction" of sorts on Fox and Friends, but if you pay careful attention, the statement read by Fox anchor Steve Doocy isn't a retraction at all. Here's what he said:

Doocy: : One other thing. We want to clarify something: On Friday of last week, we did the story from Insight magazine where we talked about how they were quoting that Barack Obama, when he was a child growing up in Indonesia, had attended a madrassa. Well, Mr. Obama's people called and they said that that is absolutely false. They said the idea that Barack Obama went to a radical Muslim school is completely ridiculous. In his book it does say that he went to a mostly Muslim school but not to a madrassa.

Obviously there is absolutely no admission of error here; they only concede that Barack Obama himself claims the story is false, which is what most people expect a politician to do even after a true expose. Doocy read his text with the tone of a junior-high bully wiseass ripping off a school-mandated "apology" in front of the class; his tone clearly indicated that he, and Fox, were greatly annoyed by the inconvenience of having to "clarify" anything for anyone.

See more stories tagged with: sean hannity, barack obama, fox news, liars

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »