The Audacity of Myth: How the Media Ignored Obama's Lies About His Own Biography and Memoir

By Tim Graham | July 13, 2013 | 18:29

[Excerpted from Collusion, by Brent Bozell and Tim Graham]

The media's sneakiest dirty trick in the book is bias by omission, because is is so hard to find, when journalists decide "what the people don't know won't hurt them," or more precisely, "what the people don't know won't hurt our candidate."

In Barack Obama's case this omission emerged in 2012 over his biographical narrative: his 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father, which became a huge bestseller as he prepared to run for president, and enriched him with an estimated $1.3 million in royalties (not to mention almost $4 million for his campaign book The Audacity of Hope), and that's just through 2007.

Reporters loved this book. In an October 23, 2006, cover story in Time magazine, Joe Klein oozed about Obama's parentage: "He told the story in brilliant, painful detail in his first book, Dreams from My Father, which may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

Chris Matthews was even more effusive, to the point of slobbery, on MSNBC, which is to say, typical. The book was "unique because he's a politician and not since U.S. Grant has a politician written his own book, and that is refreshing." It was great literature. "It's almost like Mark Twain. It's so American, it's so textured. It's so, almost sounding like great fiction because it reads like us. It's picturesque. Is that the right word, 'picturesque'? I think it's got that quality."

Matthews was exactly right. It sounded like great fiction because so much of it was fictionalized.

The warning was right there in the preface to his 1995 memoir, where Barack Obama admitted the chapters to come were taking liberties with the truth: "Although much of this book is based on contemporaneous journals or the oral histories of my family, the dialogue is necessarily an approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me." Even the people weren't entirely real: "For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology."

Ask a journalist if he supports the notion of a president whose life story is one part mythology, like George Washington and the cherry tree. Some media people have been stunned when they are told of this paragraph, as if they never read this book, or skipped the preface. But that has never nicked the larger legend that's been created. The nation's so-called guardians of factual accuracy don't even expect honesty from Obama on his own life story.

Liberal journalists -- especially hacks like Chris Matthews at MSNBC -- routinely disparage conservatives for the "birthers" and their conspiracy theories that Obama can't be president because he wasn't born in the United States. They enjoyed the circus around Donald Trump's demands for Obama's birth certificate as proof that conservatives couldn't accept a black man as president. When Romney clinched the Republican nomination in late May, NBC's Matt Lauer wondered on the Today show, "will his ongoing relationship with Donald Trump overshadow his big moment? As Trump plays the birther card once again."

But the public should see the entire national media as a pack of "mythers"-people who blithely accepted Obama's concocted life story without challenging the factual reliability of any of it. It should be called Fever Dreams From My Father. Or Day Dreams From My Father. Anything to underscore that this should not be seen as a biography.

Instead, Obama was honored for his narrative-mangling skill. In 2008, New York Times reporter Janny Scott oozed, "Senator Obama understands as well as any politician the power of a well-told story. He has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story-a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books that have helped make him a mega-best-selling, two-time Grammy-winning millionaire front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at age 46."

Liberals occasionally tried to preserve a fraction of their dignity as journalists with a few uncomfortable facts. But they were quiet about it.

For example, on July 13, 2011, in a story published on page 16, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack explained, "The White House on Wednesday declined to challenge an account in a new book that suggests that President Obama, in his campaign to overhaul American health care, mischaracterized a central anecdote about his mother's deathbed dispute with her insurance company."

The headline said the book "challenges" the Obama story, and in the story they used the word "mischaracterized." It was a whole lot more misleading than that.

That new book was titled A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. The author was Janny Scott, the same Times reporter who was so impressed with Obama's story-telling in 2008. But she found holes in the narrative. Scott quoted from correspondence from Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy. Her actual health insurer had reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument. The Times noted that although candidate Obama often suggested that Dunham "was denied health coverage because of a pre-existing condition, it appears from her correspondence that she was only denied disability coverage."

So he was lying. Indeed, reporters could have held Obama accountable for lying repeatedly on his way to his first presidential victory and beyond, obscenely using his own deceased mother as a prop – in a TV ad, in his convention speech, in a presidential debate, and in a town-hall debate over ObamaCare in 2009, just for starters.

Kevin Sack of the Times turned to liberal Harvard professor Robert Blendon to pronounce the obvious: if Obama's phony story line had been discovered during the 2008 campaign, "people would have considered it a significant error." But it was not an error. It was a bald-faced lie, repeated over and over.

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So many LIES .......so much Media COVER UP !!

It is so disheartening and we have 3 1/2 more years of it too !!

Thanks for posting a great piece, Rev !!