By Lee Habeeb
Thursday, September 06, 2012
We hear the claim every day from folks in the media:
Voter-ID laws are designed to suppress voter turnout. Never bothering to
explain how asking a citizen to get a free ID might impede his ability to vote,
they blithely advance the claims of “independent” groups such as Common Cause.
We know why. The voter-ID suppression narrative is one
the media agree with.
Last week, the Associated Press, a news organization with
a decidedly liberal bias, decided to engage in some suppression of its own. It
attempted to suppress turnout to Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2016: Obama’s
America, with the ultimate goal of protecting the presidential candidate they
agree with — a liberal — from legitimate criticism.
Talk about a twofer. They get to hurt D’Souza’s movie and,
at the same time, to help President Obama get reelected.
How can I prove that assertion? It’s quite easy. And it’s
quite a story. One that the AP won’t tell.
On August 28, AP published a “fact check” of the
documentary and pronounced the movie not accurate. An entire book could be
written on the facts that AP’s writer, Beth Fouhy, called into question. And
another on her conclusions about those facts.
But let me start by telling you a bit about 2016.
The film is based on President Obama’s own words, and I
mean his own words literally, because it features the president’s own voice
from the audio-book version of his first bestselling book. And not just little
snippets taken out of context.
D’Souza in this movie does not question the president’s
talents or his place of birth. Indeed, like so many of us who have studied
Obama’s intellectual history, D’Souza believes that Obama set out to accomplish
the very things that he is accomplishing.
Charges that he’s an amateur or that he’s incompetent
miss the larger point. Worse, they are ad hominem attacks, the kind that the
best debaters on either side of the aisle deplore.
D’Souza asserts a simple but profound point: that
President Obama wants to downsize America. He wants America to have a smaller
footprint in the world, because he believes that a smaller America would make
for a safer, better planet. If only we consumed less, if only we reduced our
military and economic strength, the world would be better off. That doesn’t
make Obama a bad man, and he is not alone. Many smart, well-meaning liberals
agree with him.
D’Souza based his conclusion on a series of facts that he
culled from the president’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father.
What were his father’s dreams? Obama’s dad left Hawaii to
do graduate work at Harvard University and then took his book learning back to
Africa. In 1963 he wrote an article for the East Africa Journal called
“Problems Facing Our Socialism,” where he made the case that high taxes are
morally and practically good if the government uses them to provide for the
people.
And how high could tax rates rise? “Theoretically,” he
wrote, “there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent
of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate
with their income which is taxed.”
That is not a typographical error. President Obama’s
father, whose dreams he adopted, argued in a scholarly journal that a 100
percent tax rate could actually work.
You’d think the AP would be interested in that fact.
Barack Obama’s father learned some pretty interesting
economic theory at Harvard. Just as Barack Obama himself learned some
interesting things about America and the world from professors such as Edward Said
at Columbia and Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School.
If only the AP and other news outlets would cover that
story.
Obama’s father had serious objections not only to
colonialism but also to capitalism. D’Souza explains in his movie that Obama
shares his father’s ideological antipathy to free enterprise, which explains
why the president makes the decisions he makes. And why he says things like
“You didn’t build that.”
The AP could legitimately have expressed disagreement
with the premise of D’Souza’s argument, but it didn’t. Why? Because that would
have required it to do an opinion piece, and it wants to hold onto what little
shred of neutrality it thinks it enjoys in the eyes of the consuming public.
Better for it to peddle its opinions through a reporter’s
“fact check” piece than to reveal its true political predisposition.
Fouhy claims that the evidence D’Souza provided for his
argument was “a logical stretch at best” given that President Obama had such
little contact with his father. But D’Souza didn’t write Dreams from My Father,
Barack Obama did. Fouhy’s beef should be with that book, not this documentary.
As for specific facts that Fouhy called into question,
here is one: “D’Souza rightly argues that the national debt has risen to $16
trillion under Obama. But he never mentions the explosion of debt that occurred
under Obama’s predecessor, Republican George W. Bush, nor the 2008 global
financial crisis that provoked a shock to the U.S. economy.”
In fact, D’Souza did mention President Bush’s spending
habits — with a graph, no less. And in any case, he was not making a documentary
about George W. Bush. Maybe Fouhy and the AP will make that movie, but this one
is about President Obama and the real reason he’s running up the national debt
to unprecedented levels.
The rest of Fouhy’s so-called fact checks were just as
absurd. And so I ask, after witnessing a good old-fashioned smear of an opinion
piece masquerading as a fact-check piece, who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
How do we know that they are not advancing an agenda of
their own by distorting facts in the name of fact-checking? Or fact-checking
one side but not the other?
If the AP is fact-checking D’Souza’s documentary, did it
also fact-check Al Gore’s? Or any of Michael Moore’s?
My colleague Tom Tradup, vice president of programming
for Salem Radio Network, questioned the AP’s selective use of “fact checks” in
its treatment of 2016. “I don’t know specifically if we did ‘Fact Checks’ per
se on the other documentaries mentioned,” Sally Busbee, the AP’s
Washington-bureau chief, said in response.
She doesn’t know? Can’t she do a quick Google search and
find out?
This is I what I do know: D’Souza worked hard to make his
movie, and attempts by a large news organization to deter people from seeing it
are outrageous.
Just as bad is the willfully blind eye that most of the
news media turned to the documentary until just recently. Because the success
of 2016 is actually quite a story.
The film opened many weeks ago in one theater in Houston.
As the distribution of 2016 expanded, its revenue per screen grew, a correlation
that tends not to happen in movieland. It was shown in nearly 1,800 theaters
over the Labor Day weekend and was among the top five box-office draws.
It also became the highest-grossing conservative
documentary ever, something you’d think might have been worthy of some
headlines. But it didn’t get many.
If the AP and the rest of the media had an ounce of
common sense, they would at least pretend to care about a movie that
conservatives are flocking to see. Especially given that 42 percent of Americans
self-identify as conservatives, while only 20 percent self-identify as
liberals.
And those aren’t my facts. They’re Gallup’s, from 2010.
So if I could give the AP some advice: Forget the fact
checks. Perhaps it’s time for a reality check.
Try putting aside your bias, and try treating liberals
and conservatives equally, be it political candidates or documentarians.
And now and then, do some fact-checking on your own
reporter’s fact-checking.
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