Even WND disputes Corsi's phony Obama birth certificate claim

Summary: WorldNetDaily.com, for which Jerome Corsi, author of the debunked and discredited book The Obama Nation, works as a staff reporter, has now taken on the claim that its own writer has been promoting, and determined for itself to be false -- that the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama "has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website." WorldNetDaily reported that a "WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts ... found the document to be authentic."

WorldNetDaily.com, the right-wing website for which Jerome Corsi works as a staff reporter, decided to look into a claim made by Corsi and made repeatedly in right-wing blogs and on talk radio -- that the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama "has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website" -- and reported that it was false. In an August 23 article, WND reported that "FactChecker.org says it obtained Obama's actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real," and added, "A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic." Corsi is the author of the debunked and discredited book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions, August 2008).

WND stated that the August 21 Factcheck.org report "discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama's campaign lacked a raised seal," and that the WND investigation "revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there." But WND did not mention that Corsi repeated the charge that Obama's birth certificate was fake on the August 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends. Factcheck.org, however, did note in its report that the "charge leaped from the blogosphere to the mainstream media earlier this week when Jerome Corsi ... repeated the claim in an Aug. 15 interview with Steve Doocy on Fox News."

A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.

http://mediamatters.org/items/200808260014?f=h_latest