After writing that Sen. John McCain had “launched a string of increasingly personal attacks on” Sen. Barack Obama, Washington Post writers Jonathan Weisman and Perry Bacon Jr. reported in an August 7 article that McCain “accused him [Obama] of going to a gym rather than visiting wounded troops” while overseas. But Weisman and Bacon did not note that McCain's accusation is false: Obama did in fact visit wounded troops during his recent trip, according to NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who was covering the trip. Mitchell reported in a July 25 appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe that Obama “visited a casualty unit in the Green Zone.” On July 28, Mitchell again said that Obama had visited troops while overseas, reporting: “I can attest to the fact that he did visit troops in Iraq only four or five days earlier, that there was no notice of it, that I confirmed that it happened, but they had no video of any type and no reporters. And that he's been to Walter Reed. So let's at least get that off the table.”

From Weisman and Bacon's August 7 Washington Post article:

The parries come more than a week after his Republican opponent launched a string of increasingly personal attacks on Obama. McCain has said that his rival would lose a war in order to win a campaign, accused him of going to a gym rather than visiting wounded troops, and, while aides asserted that he had “played the race card,” hinted that Obama has a messiah complex and portrayed him as a celebrity comparable to Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. That final line of assault continued yesterday with a new McCain ad, again mocking Obama as “the biggest celebrity in the world.”