Now that President Obama has released his birth certificate, I demand apologies from the people on both sides who spread lies, intentional or otherwise. APOLOGIZE…
FROM ANTI-BIRTHERS: You were wrong. The stock response to anyone who dared to mention the fact that the birth certificate had until now remained hidden, was a false claim that “he [President Obama] HAS [released it]”. Even when anti-birthers like myself would observe that the document released was in fact not a birth certificate and did not prove anything on this issue in the context of still mentioning that the conspiracy theory is ridiculous and wholly without merit – you people still smeared us as being birther-nuts and kept falsely saying the birth certificate was already released. You were wrong. It was just now released. Apologize. It is not okay to spread lies just because the other side is peddling a theory based on lies. You fight lies with TRUTH. not more lies. APOLOGIZE.
FROM BIRTHERS: You were wrong. I’m not going to waste time in dissecting exactly why it is insanely stupid to hold the belief that Barack Obama’s mother who was living in Hawaii whilst pregnant, flew via 1960s air travel all the way to Kenya to have her baby and for some reason have someone plant a false newspaper birth announcement back in her Hawaiian hometown newspaper (and for what gain or motive?). Instead lets just stick to the obvious: you said the birth certificate would show he was born in Africa. here it is… it doesn’t say that. You were wrong. APOLOGIZE.
Top birther Jerome Corsi’s book will be released on May 17, 2011 (this is not a joke):
You were wrong. You invested a lot of money into something you will not get back unless you continue to scam people with claims that “the book is more relevant now, than ever”. Don’t do that. Escape with a shred of dignity and admit you were wrong and eat the losses on the book.
APOLOGIZE….
Equally annoying are the people who drove this as a news story, almost entirely for partisan reasons. MSNBC covered it extensively with full segments, back to back while I never saw anything about it on Fox except in single question form by a host or comment by guest to dismiss how dumb it is. Still though, it wasn’t that big a deal in relation to everything else across the board anywhere. Contrary to the Presidents claim, the Birther controversy was 4% of newshole, not ‘dominant’ story.
An analysis of cable news coverage shows that 19 percent of the cable news airtime studied focused on the 2012 election last week. Mark Jurkowitz, Associate Director of PEJ, provides this breakdown of the coverage by cable network:
MSNBC
including “The Ed Show,” “Hardball,” “The Last Word,” and “The Rachel Maddow Show”
- 28% of airtime studied was devoted to the 2012 election
- 10% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 92% of the Obama coverage
Fox
including “Special Report w/Bret Baier,” “Fox Report w/Shepard Smith,” “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Hannity”
- 16% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
- 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 8% of the Obama coverage
CNN
including “The Situation Room,” “John King, USA,” “In The Arena,” and “Anderson Cooper 360?
- 11% of airtime studied was devoted to 2012 election
- 5% of airtime studied was devoted to Obama
- A subset of that Obama airtime was coded “citizenship and religion rumors” to include “birther” coverage, which was 100% of the Obama coverage.
Jurkowitz says MSNBC consistently devotes more of its airtime to politics, based on PEJ’s research, while CNN generally spends the least amount of time on politics of the three cable networks.
While MSNBC’s coverage may have been devoted to questioning or debunking the president’s citizenship issues, that network spent the most time discussing it.
Donald Trumps reaction was to tell everyone “you’re welcome”, taking full credit for the release. This is…valid. His headline making on the issue indeed is probably what changed it from a useful tool for the Administration to use to make Republicans look like crazy morons into an actual detriment that they needed to clean up before it made them look worse. Still though: he has to cop to the fact that his hunch was wrong, his “research project in Hawaii” never actually existed, and just on the plain old facts, he lost on this. Admit it already…
