The news headlines at MSN.com broadcast an enormous lie this morning.
"Many say Obama is a Muslim. Did you know?"
In fact, it was their top story....
Wait, it gets worse. I'd tried to call them on it, by publishing an article on the citizen journalism site, Newsvine. (I wrote that "It isn't true - Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim - but by asking 'Did you know,' MSN implies that it's an established fact...")
And then Newsvine apparently censored my article.
I'd forgotten one thing. Newsvine is owned by MSNBC - the same news outlet that was spreading the inaccurate headline. Suddenly the article disappeared from my list of recent news articles. And anyone trying to read my article was re-directed instead to a different page, which refused to display the article unless they first created a new registration for the Newsvine web site, and then logged in with an approved name and password.
I contacted the site's help address (as well as their "Press Relations" e-mail address), but it's been nearly two hours, and they have yet to respond. Here's a complete screenshot of the entire web page - and here's the text of the article that I'd tried to publish.
The news headlines at MSN.com just broadcast an enormous lie.
"Many say Obama is a Muslim. Did you know?"
It isn't true - Obama is a Christian and not a Muslim - but by asking "Did you know," MSN implies that it's an established fact. The article appears to be referencing a new poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that 18% of Americans still believed (incorrectly) that President Obama is a Muslim. One year ago, only 11% of Americans held this erroneous belief.
That poll was taken before Obama announced he supported the right to build a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center. CNN has also conducted a new poll after the announcement, and reported that now 24% of Americans wrongly believed that Obama was a Muslim.
The White House responded angrily today, saying "there has been an effort by some to regularly malign and distort his faith."