Insight magazine "madrassa" media controversy

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On January 17, 2007, the online magazine Insight published an unsourced article reporting a rumor that advisors to American presidential candidate U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton had discovered that rival candidate U.S. Senator Barack Obama was a former Muslim, had been educated in a Wahhabist madrassa as a child in Indonesia, and were planning to make this a campaign issue.^[1] Over the next several days a number of conservative pundits and news programs on Fox News Channel picked up and repeated the story, including John Gibson of The Big Story, Gretchen Carlson and Steve Doocy, co-hosts of Fox & Friends, Sean Hannity of Hannity & Colmes and Glenn Beck of CNN's Headline News.

CNN reporter John Vause visited the Basuki School, the Indonesian public elementary school Obama had attended, and found its staff in Western attire, its student body apparently consisting of Muslims, "Christians, Buddhists, also Confucian(s)".^[2] The CNN story also quoted a spokesman for Clinton dismissing the allegation as "an obvious right-wing hit job" on both candidates. Insight responded by saying that CNN's investigation did "not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting", while excusing themselves as being only responsible for supplying "political intelligence" on "a limited budget".^[3] Insight editor Jeffrey T. Kuhner maintains that the article is "solid as solid can be"^[4]. A January 29, 2007 New York Times story, "Feeding Frenzy for a Big Story, Even if It’s False" said the story had been "quickly discredited". The article states, "Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters." Fox News later stated that the story violated their basic rule of knowing "what you are talking about.”

David D. Kirkpatrick Published: January 29, 2007 IHT http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/29/america/web.0129rumour.php

^[5]

Obama himself wrote about his early school years in his book Dreams from My Father (p.142):

"In Indonesia, I’d spent 2 years at a Muslim school, 2 years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I’d pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended."[2]