Timeline of the (DEBUNKED) "Obama went to a Madrassa" Smear

January 17
On January 17, InsightMag.com posted the original article on the subject.

January 18
On December 13, Jason Zengerle, editor of The Plank, the weblog of The New Republic, predicted that Republicans would "launch a savage and despicable whispering campaign against the guy (Barack Hussein Obama, etc.) and then blame it all on Hillary."

January 19
The next day, as Zengerle predicted, conservatives were abuzz about the article. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Melanie Morgan, and Morgan co-host Lee Rodgers all discussed the InsightMag.com article on their radio programs. That afternoon, Fox News host John Gibson dedicated two segments of The Big Story to the InsightMag.com article, including a discussion with Republican strategist Terry Holt.

January 20
A January 20 New York Post article quoted Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson saying, "We have no connection to this story."

January 21
On the January 21 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, CNN and Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz blasted Gibson for not having "done the firsthand reporting" and noted that Obama "writes in his autobiography that he spent two years at a Muslim school in Indonesia." Later in the discussion, CBS national political correspondent Gloria Borger noted that "the easiest thing to do is say that the Hillary Clinton campaign is spreading this about Barack Obama, which is, you know, ridiculous."

January 22
The morning of January 22 began with a "clarification" by the hosts of Fox & Friends First, which was reiterated later on Fox & Friends. Co-host Steve Doocy noted that "Mr. Obama's people called and they said that that is absolutely false." Co-host Brian Kilmeade added that the Clinton camp said "we did not have anything to do with that story." On The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer repeatedly teased a report that he promised would "debunk a possible smear campaign against Senator Barack Obama." CNN correspondent John Vause visited "Barack Obama's elementary school in Jakarta" and stated that he's "been to madrassas in Pakistan, and this school is nothing like that." (The report did not address the charge that Clinton was behind the story.) The report was the first of several by major media outlets discrediting the InsightMag.com claim that Obama had attended a madrassa.

January 23
The next day, InsightMag.com responded to CNN's debunking with a post titled "Hats off to CNN, but ... " The response claimed that "CNN didn't debunk anything" and added: "Insight never -- not once -- in its article claims that Obama went to a Madrassa. We didn't claim it; Hillary's people did." Additionally, it rehashed the unfounded smear against Obama and suggested that the issue should be investigated "by other news outlets -- such as Fox News -- who will look the facts straight on, without a vested ideological interest in downplaying Obama's Muslim heritage." InsightMag.com also posed this question of Obama: "If he was raised in a secular household (as he claims), why does he have -- or retain -- Muslim names, Barack and Hussein?"

January 24
On January 24, the Associated Press reaffirmed CNN's debunking of the charge that Obama attended a madrassa in Jakarta. The article reported that "interviews by The Associated Press at the elementary school in Jakarta found that it's a public and secular institution that has been open to students of all faiths since before the White House hopeful attended in the late 1960s."

January 25
On the morning of January 25, on the front page of ABC News' website, a headline read: "Madrassa Madness: Was Hillary Behind Obama Smear?" below pictures of Clinton and Obama, despite the fact that the article to which the headline links notes that the accusation that Clinton is responsible for the smear "remains unproven and unsubstantiated." The January 25 ABCNews.com article bearing that headline was written by ABC News senior national correspondent Jake Tapper, who described the InsightMag.com article as "since-discredited." He wrote that InsightMag.com "cited (only) unnamed sources" and noted that, since the article was published, media figures have "repeat(ed) the false charges" against Obama "while bemoaning the notion that the Clinton campaign was investigating Obama's past, a charge that remains unproven and unsubstantiated."

January 27
On January 27, the first editorial from a major U.S. newspaper on the smear appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The editorial said that "what Insight did on its Web site, and what Fox News did in repeating the report" was "unethical, unprofessional and shabby, a trifecta, if you will, in the world of journalism."

January 28
The next day, The Washington Post editorial board chimed in. The editorial stated: "Insight, whose piece was eagerly touted by Fox News Network, might have learned" that Obama attended a public school in Indonesia, not a madrassa, "if it had bothered to check its story rather than cravenly attributing the false report to 'Hillary Clinton's camp,' citing unnamed 'sources close to the background check' that the New York senator supposedly conducted into Mr. Obama."

January 29
Twelve days after the InsightMag.com story was posted, and one week after it was first debunked by CNN, Fox News political analyst Dick Morris continued to speculate on the story's origin. Appearing on the January 29 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Morris said: "I believe that that Insight magazine story that was inaccurate, that he went to a Muslim school, was indeed planted, as Insight magazine said, by somebody close to the Clinton war room." Co-host Alan Colmes asked Morris whether that statement was also "a smear against the Clintons." Morris replied: "No, it's an accurate description of their tactics."

The same day, The New York Times featured an article about the smear on its front page. The article noted that InsightMag.com editor Jeffrey Kuhner "said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be 'solid as solid can be.' " The New York Times article added that the InsightMag.com "article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics, the Iraq war or the Bush administration, including a widely discussed report on the Insight Web site that President Bush's relationship with his father was so strained that they were no longer speaking to each other about politics." The New York Times article also reported that The Washington Times "quickly disavowed the article." The article said The Washington Times' "national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading 'Insight Strikes Again' telling them to 'make sure that no mention of any Insight story' appeared in the paper."

The New York Times story was also discussed on the January 29 edition of PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer by Jeffrey Brown, senior correspondent for The NewsHour; David D. Kirkpatrick, who wrote the New York Times article; and Ellen Hume, the director of the Center on Media and Society at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Kirkpatrick appeared to refer to Shine's statement in saying: "nd in Fox's defense, it was mostly their commentators who picked it up. It wasn't their news reporter who picked it up. And they've apologized. They said they made a mistake.' " But, again, Shine's statement apparently did not address the allegation that Clinton was behind the madrassa smear -- an allegation that Gibson promoted.

Earlier in the discussion, Brown described the original InsightMag.com story as "quite a story itself: discussed as though fact, debunked as fiction; a case study in how information -- anonymous and apparently incorrect information in this case -- can spread quickly and cause a political stir." Hume called the story "a perfect political hit -- they tried to kill off two Democratic campaigns at the same time" and added: "All of this paints journalists with a brush that is, unfortunately, not bringing audience to real news. It's murking up the media landscape in a way that journalists have a very hard time recovering from."

http://mediamatters.org/items/200701300007

And far too many DUers lapped it up.

Jonah Goldberg was one of the panelists. I was going to start a thread on this but forgot.

Kurtz and his gang couldn't come to any conclusions about the story and I was just sitting there staring at my TV saying, "Did the "Fox News" part skip by you?"

This was yet another perfect example of how the RW noise machine works.