The "Liberalmedia" enable bad campaigning.

[David Franks]

Media Advisory

You Didn't Build That--or Say It
In election attacks, 'working' trumps true

8/1/12

"Sometimes the problem with corporate media's coverage of elections is the absence of factchecking. And then there are times when the problem is more fundamental than that--when reporters suspend a minimal level of critical judgment in order to allow a political campaign to set a preferred storyline.

"Recent campaign coverage has focused on a supposed Barack Obama 'gaffe' that was made to appear to be an attack on small business owners. This came during an Obama appearance on July 13; the quote, in the isolation preferred by the Romney campaign, was this:

'If you've got a business, you didn't build that.'

"What Obama said was actually this:

'Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business–you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.'

"It would be hard to draw a rational conclusion that Obama was saying that small business owners don't build small businesses. As FAIR's Jim Naureckas noted (FAIR Blog, 7/20/12):

"Now, if you've got a basic understanding of the English language, you can see that the word 'that' there doesn't refer to 'business'–it refers to 'roads and bridges' in the previous sentence. If you can't see that, you really shouldn't be in the word business.

"The thrust of the Romney attack, which emerged several days after Obama said these words, was to argue that Obama really did mean what he most certainly did not.

"But campaign journalists are mostly not in the factchecking business. Their main preoccupation is in cataloguing the attacks and counter-attacks in a campaign season...."

Continue reading at
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4593