Today Rush Limbaugh was fuming over a Politico report that the President had admitted to biographer David Maranis that “Genevieve Cook,” the New York girlfriend depicted in his 1995 autobiography “Dreams From My Father,” was not a real person but a composite of several girlfriends. Rush’s point: the book was widely represented, by the President as well as others, as true. What else in the book is a lie?
Politico, however, did something novel: its reporters went to the book itself. They found that Obama had written, right up front, that some characters were composites, though he didn’t say which. Limbaugh’s larger point is still valid: if it contained fiction, and composite characters are that, the book is not reliable, and is not truly a work of non-fiction that can or should be trusted. Obama did not hide that fact, however…if anyone had been paying attention.
What bothers me is that it is increasingly clear that nobody was paying attention. This is the second aspect of Obama’s supposed autobiography that was suddenly discovered by the media this year, four years after the 2008 campaign began, four years after I thought the press was doing its job and vetting this relative newcomer on the national stage. You know what the other one is: the President’s dog snack, which some sources also believe was fabricated by the President.
How could this happen? I remember reading many references to what Obama said about his upbringing and other matters in the media in 2008, yet is obvious that no journalist undertook a serious, line-by-line, fact-by-fact investigation of a man who was running for President of the United States.
This is blatant journalistic incompetence, and a breach of duty and the public trust. It is also, I think, more strong evidence, if any more was needed, of how completely and unconscionably the mainstream media was determined to see Barack Obama elected, how desperately most journalists didn’t want to be the one accused of derailing the ascension of America’s first black President, and how unprofessional the rest, including reporters for more conservative news organizations, were. They didn’t do their job, and perform the minimal due diligence they would have done on any other candidate. If they had, we would have known about Obama’s tale of weird food in Indonesia, and we would have known that “Genevieve” didn’t exist, when we most urgently needed to have those and a thousand other pieces of information, to allow us understand who this eloquent, smart young man with the unusual background and the disturbingly thin resume really was before we made him leader of the most powerful nations on earth.
When Sarah Palin’s autobiography “Going Rogue” was published, the AP, the Washington Post and others assigned teams of ‘fact-checkers’ at considerable expense, to examine every word Palin had published under her name. At the time she was neither an elected official nor an announced candidate for office. Why? Because they wanted to “get” her. There’s no other legitimate reason. Yet the man whose autobiography was ripe for fact-checking and whom journalists had an absolute obligation to scrutinize with all the powers of analysis at their disposal simply skated by without serious challenge, as he has so often.
It is disgraceful, and it is infuriating. I don’t blame the President, not in the least, but just when I think my lack of respect for the news media and the journalism profession has hit rock bottom, something like this turns up. No journalist read the President’s autobiography, or if they did, they did so lazily and uncritically.
The American public deserves better from this unholy disgrace of a profession, but it is increasingly clear that we’re just not going to get it.
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Spark: Rush Limbaugh
Facts: Politico
Sources:
Graphic: Realistic Relationships
Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
Spot on, Jack. As with the Travan Martin case, the real story is the media’s behavior: nonfeasance, in it’s reporting on Obama, deliberate malfeasance in the Martin case.
Why? Because they wanted to “get” her. There’s no other legitimate reason.
First of all, you seem to be implying that “getting her” was a legitimate reason. Better to say that there was no legitimate reason, full stop. But there is another reason, and that is that the content of her book may have been deemed more likely to generate attention from the “news”-devouring public. She’s an interesting figure for public scrutiny. People wanted to hear what she had to say, some of them out of admiration, others because they were expecting something crazy or dumb. Just because something serves political bias, doesn’t mean it was motivated by political bias.
You suggest that the ostensibly liberal factions of the news media didn’t scrutizine candidate Obama because they were in the tank for him, but that more conservative journalists simply weren’t doing their jobs well. That seems oddly presumptuous. Why should we observe that everybody failed in the same way and assume that it was for two different reasons?
I heartily agree that the media is extraordinarily bad at its job. Isn’t that enough? We’d do better to reform it without the finger-pointing and the damned martrydom complexes. If two teams are facing each other but a bunch of players don’t do anything other than defecate on the field, those players can’t really be said to be on anyone’s side. They just make it impossible to play a clean game.
Yes, I think that’s a very persuasive strong argument, Ed. Given that both ends of the polar media failed in exactly the same way, it fulfills Occam’s Razor to presume laziness and incompetence rather than bias and design.
As for Palin, “getting her’ was a ridiculous reason, except that, as you say, it attracted ratings and traffic. Still, the media’s obsession with Palin hatred is so strong and irrational that it has to figure in somewhere.
I’ve played in games like the one Ed describes. It sorta makes the whole concept of “winning” irrelevant (and, for that matter, the concept of “game”).
For an interesting example of someone who DID read Obama’s biographical material with painstaking care, you might take a look at Justin Frank’s book OBAMA ON THE COUCH, in which the author (a psychoanalyst) uses Obama’s written words, public speeches, and actions to probe the inner workings of his psychological makeup. He did the same thing with George W. Bush in his earlier BUSH ON THE COUCH. While the accuracy of both exercises is highly debatable (as the author freely admits), they make for pretty good reading.
Too bad that Dr. Frank doesn’t write for a newspaper.