On Special Report, Hume knocked Obama for misremembering magazine article, but didn't note Obama was a child at the time
On the March 27 edition of Fox News' Special Report, anchor and Washington bureau managing editor Brit Hume cited a March 25 Chicago Tribune article to support his claim that "[r]eporters digging into [Sen.] Barack Obama's [D-IL] background have found some instances where the facts do not appear to square with Obama's memories." Hume claimed the Tribune "reported problems with a story in the senator's first book about seeing a Life magazine picture of a black man who damaged his skin using chemicals to try to lighten it. The magazine says it ran no such picture or article." Hume continued: "Obama recently said, 'Well, it may have been Ebony magazine,' but Ebony says no as well."
Hume, however, omitted a key fact that was included in the Tribune article -- Obama wrote that he saw the magazine photos when he was 9 years old, 25 years before his memoir, Dreams From My Father (Three Rivers Press, 1995), was published.
Obama, who was born in 1961, lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971. On Pages 29 and 30 of Dreams, Obama wrote:
But in one corner I found a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders. I thumbed through the glossy advertisements -- Goodyear Tires and Dodge Fever, Zenith TV ("Why not the best?") and Campbell's Soup ("Mm-mmm good!"), men in white turtlenecks pouring Seagram's over ice as women in red miniskirts looked on admiringly -- and felt vaguely reassured. When I came upon a news photograph, I tried to guess the subject of the story before reading the caption.
[...]
Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn't guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man's hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man's crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.
He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino -- I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
[...]
We had lived in Indonesia for over three years by that time, the result of my mother's marriage to an Indonesian man named Lolo, another student she had met at the University of Hawaii.
As Media Matters for America documented, the March 27 Politico article stretched Obama's inconsistencies that even the article's author admitted were "trivial" into a 1,200-word, front-page article that conservative Internet gossip Matt Drudge flagged an hour prior to its publication on the paper's website.
From the March 27 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:
HUME: Reporters digging into Barack Obama's background have found some instances where the facts do not appear to square with Obama's memories. The Chicago Tribune has reported problems with a story in the senator's first book about seeing a Life magazine picture of a black man who damaged his skin using chemicals to try to lighten it. The magazine says it ran no such picture or article. Obama recently said, "Well, it may have been Ebony magazine," but Ebony says no as well.
I could pontificate on why but I'll just state it. Brit Hume is an ass with a puss only his mother could love.
yeah-- and those guys have no memory either:
The magazine Obama saw was most probably LOOK, which was Life's competitor at the time. They used to always run photo essays like this. A great magazine now long forgotten-- I'm sure that was it and the spread sounds familiar too...
Right. He looks like that cartoon Basset hound. What's his name? Droopy?
The Flying Monkey Obama Paradigm is taking shape...he's another "serial exaggerator". Sound familiar? I've heard this mentioned a couple of times on the talking head shows. You'd think they could at least come up with new propaganda.
Well, "serial exaggerator" did work once pretty well. A shallow man of low intelligence and integrity got elected over a man of character, vision, and smarts.
Why would "those who know no shame" not try this again?
Brit Hume!! GOOD JOB AT *REPORTING*!! This stuff is getting so damn ridiculous... they are commenting on MEMORIES OF PICTURES OF A NINE YEAR OLD to cast some dubious light on a presidential candidate- God, these *media* channels are so full of it...
As usual, god's only purpose in allowing the existence of FoxLies, has to be as a bad example! (Or is that, as an examle of bad?)
The love-affair is over. Now, Obama will be painted as a liar...and racist. Too early for these 'primary' personality races.
I'm glad the media are staying on top of Magazinegate. A guy who tells a lie like this could conceivably lie about the presence of WMDs in a country that hasn't attacked us, so he could start an ill-planned war of choice.
Naaah, too improbable.
Brit is gearing up to take Snow's place once his head falls off from all the spinning he does at the Right House...
Hume sounds like Presidential Press Secretary Material!
Obama shouldn't have written about Michael Jackson like that.
He was 9 years old at the time!! what DO YOU REMEMBER CLEARLY WHEN YOUR 9 LEATHER!!? Your diaper wads? First time making out with a frog?
And what he wrote in his book was simply recalling (to the best of his ability) something he saw in a magazine as a child, he wrote what he could recall from the magazine article. What so hard to grasp here? Hume clearly is intentionally misleading his audience by omitting a key fact that puts EVERYTHING into context.
This is laughable.
I guess since McCain is crashing and burning, they feel they have to go out of their way to get at Obama now. By any means necessary.
Poor Foxnoise. They got nothing, so they make up something.
I cannot but help wonder why they have to lie so much? Is the truth really that incomprehensible for them? Surely they cannot believe the saying that a Neo Clown who tells the truth will have his explode....can they?
Someone please tell them it's not true.
Oh, Hume is an idiot and always has been. Right along with his fellow morons.
I'm really thinking that an October 28, 1966 article in TIME Magazine entitled “What the Negro Has — and Has Not — Gained” is the article in question. It talks about skin bleaching. I know I get confused between TIME and LIFE - maybe because there are 4 letters and they are just one word titles. At 9 years old - real easy to get it mixed up :)
I dunno Daily- that seems pretty far-fetched.
I prefer the dirty rotten liar making up a crazy story about a magazine to achieve... uh... hm, what would be the motive?
Never mind.
Obama and DailyObamaDotCom are correct. There was such an article back then. I believe it was Life magazine (though there may have been one in Time as well). I know this because I saved the article and the pages are huge, just like Life's are. The difference is that the Life article was about a woman, not a man. She had what I think is called Impatigo, where patches of her skin turned white due to the lack of pigment. She choose a radical and I believe dangerouse treatment that removed pigment from all her skin, thus turning her white. When asked why she did that and was she happy, her husband, seemingly without hesitation or rancor, replied saying that of course she was happy, who wouldn't want to be white. I was so horrified by the article and the thought of someone with so much self hate over the color of their skin that they would do such a thing. I believe I still have the article tucked away some where. Last time I read it was about 15 years ago. I do not know when it was originally done, say for that it was probably done in the late 50's to early to mid 60s.
So apparently the so called media did a lousy seach for the article since I kept that article and I can attest to it's exsistance.
you have to wonder how much life invested in checking this out. all life has been for the past few years is a sunday newpaper supplement.
LOL . . . boy there ain't nuttin get past ol eagle-eye Hume. I can't believe that what ever network it was he used to work for let him slip away.
I read the transcript from this on FOXnews before I came here and it also pointed out that Obama apparently claimed his parents had sex after a civil rights march in the south had inspired them to concieve, which as beautiful as that sounds? I wouldn't put it past Fox news to make up some thing like that. I believe a decent number of Fox news viewers hear a voice in their heads that repeats the pharse, "Something that silly has gotta be true" numerous times a day.
It that really good old "lumpy" Hume...
or just a box of Cream of White?
At this point jumping on jackasses like hume is a waste of time. The only people who believe anything he says are the 29% of the country who thinks all the repubs do (Iraq, the economy, ethics in governing, etc.) is just fine. Their hypocracy, meanness, and arrogance is sweeping hume and his ilk to the dust bin. No place for clowns when this country needs to get serious.
Somebody should confirm the LOOK article and end this debate.
Otherwise, I don't want to hear the "he was only 9 years old" excuses because Obama saw fit to put those into his book that was printed and marketed as factual. Apparently, he felt his memory was accurate enough that it was OK to put that stuff in a book.
And, since Obama hasn't had to deal with any major matters of national importance (defense, economic policies, etc), people need something to go on to judge Obama's credibility. If not his books, what then?
I agree. It's a shame he didn't marry his cousin, or go through a messy public divorce or something. Something with a little meat to it that we could judge him on.
"since Obama hasn't had to deal with any major matters of national importance (defense, economic policies, etc), people need something to go on to judge Obama's credibility. If not his books, what then?"
All right, who is this "reporter" Hume is referencing? Odds are it's a Republican opposition researcher, or a Fox Noise intern, tasked with finding something, anything, that might undercut Obama's credibility.
And this is all they could come up with? A fuzzy memory, around the edges, of a picture that had a strong impact on a nine-year-old? You're accepting the implied, and deceptive, conflation of a non-substantive, innacurate memory, with a tendency to untruthfulness. Apples and oranges. Go back to school and take Logic 101.
In your attempt at sarcasm, you hit the "Rusty" nail on the head.
This is stupid. Even if Obama was a child at the time the magazine supposedly printed the story, was he a child when he made the remarks about having read the article ? Or was he an adult ?
And, even more typically, a straightforward reporting of Obama's remarks is referred to as a "knock". Just like when the flim-flam artist Joe Wilson's wife got caught playing politics from her CIA desk job--- the Democrats and clowns in the press cried that the Republicans were trying to "smear" her. The truth cannot be a smear. You people are so pathetic
Got a twofer here, a liar and a fool. He remembers an article from his youth, apparantly not perfectly, he might be wrong about the periodical. As for Wilson you are a flat out liar. Wilson did nothing wrong neither did Plame. The Bush administration in a fit of political pique being caught red handed distorting the FACTS, exposed Wilsons wife as a covert CIA agent. Worthless pathetic morons like YOU then come along and make up lies to appologize for such venal actions. Your mother should be ashamed you turned out this way.