Bob McCarty Writes

Associated Press reported in an article March 5 that Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama’s grandmother in Kenya was a Christian. Six days later, AP issued a correction: “Grandma Obama” is a Muslim after all. How did such a blatant falsehood — known in journalism circles as an “error in fact” — make its way past the editors at AP? I suspect it was no accident.

The editors involved in reviewing the article — written by Katherine Houreld and published by USA TODAY under the headline, Obama’s grandma slams ‘untruths’ — would, no doubt, adamantly deny such an accusation. Behind closed newsroom doors, however, I suspect the effort has already been deemed a success.

Why? Because the editors know the number of people — especially members of the voting-age population — who read the original article will far outdistance the number who read the correction almost a week later. As a result, more Christian voters — folks to whom faith in the God of the Bible matters — will walk into their respective voting booths this year, thinking Barack Obama’s grandmother is a Christian instead of a Muslim.

What might prompt the editors to take such an action? Perhaps they had read a post of mine, published almost nine weeks earlier, in which I asked a question, Why is ‘Grandma Obama’ Still Living in a Hut? That post, in turn, was prompted by a Barack Obama quote about his grandmother’s living conditions that appeared on the ABC News Political Radar.

I’ll probably never know whether my post prompted the AP editors to take the actions they did. I do know, however, that readers of the original article need to know about the correction as it appeared at USA TODAY and the correction as it was published by AP.

Note: The AP article, Obama’s grandma slams ‘untruths’, remains on the USA TODAY web site without any direct link to their correction, leaving readers in search of the correction at least three options:

1. Run a Google News Search;
2. Search the USA TODAY web site; or
3. Read blog like tis one, Atlas Shrugs and Gateway Pundit.

I recommend #3.