Obama in the Tabloids:
Misleading article smears Obama in the National Enquirer,
which is owned by a key financial backer of Clinton.

When wandering up to the check-out line at the grocery store, my eyes feel an attraction with magnetic-like force to the colorful, bold tabloids that boast the newest celebrity secrets. Generally it's some superstar on the cover who is either pregnant, is going to rehab, has cheated on their husband, or has gained a lot of weight (it's always pleasant seeing a superstar's cellulite jiggling out of their bikini. I guess celebrities aren't immune!)

I think tabloids are America's guilty pleasure. We all glance at the ridiculous headlines and try not to seem too interested in public, but secretly want to tear through the tabloid and read all the gritty gossip.

I don't see too much harm in reading about Brittney Spears and Lindsey Lohan's latest escapades, but when tabloids creep onto political turf, my heart starts beating a little faster.

This is what happened when I saw this on the front of the National Enquirer:


After reading the article online from someone's blog who had scanned the article and posted it (which has since been removed), I realized that the headlines, like most that appear on tabloids were misleading. This scared me. I saw many customers reading the headlines, but not the article, and as of now, I can't find the article online anywhere. Luckily, I printed it out before it was removed and have investigated the accusations further.

First, and most scary, was the misleading headline that Obama has a close relationship to a terrorist. In today's society, the word terrorism is synonymous with the middle east. Obama's name has led many naive people to believe that Obama is a Muslim. The New York Times said in an article that "some posts even claim Obama is an Iranian agent." The Enquirer headline could only spur more rumors.

If readers read the entire article, however, it would become apparant that the word terrorist is actually referring to Bill Ayers who was a former member of a 1960's anti-american group the Weatherman who was involved with the hippie-era bombings of the Pentagon.

Ayers is now a professor in Chicago who is no longer associated with the activist culture of his younger years. And Obama's relationship with Ayers was not in the 60's, but the 90's when they served together as board members of the Chicago nonprofit the Woods Fund whose "goal is to increase opportunities for less advantaged people and communities in the metropolitan area," according to their website.

This type of activity doesn't seem too harmful to me. Since when was helping the less fortunate an act of terrorism?

Yet the article included a photograph of like this one of Obama wearing a turban and Somali clothes that burn a middle eastern image into the minds of paranoid readers.

The two other accusations relied heavily, if not entirely, on rumors. The article quoted a private investigator, Donald Young, saying "There have also been rumors about Barack's personal life and his sexuality" - not quite a definitive source.

I wondered why the Enquirer would run such a story, so decided to look up who owns the Enquirer. I found this on politico.com: "the key owner of the Enquirer is a prominent New York investment banker and one of Hillary Clinton's key backers, Roger Altman. Altman was an official in the first Clinton administration, and his name is often mentioned as a possible Clinton Treasury Secretary."

Business Week said this about Altman: "As a former Deputy Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and an adviser to the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton, he is a player in Washington."

Interesting.

Anyways, the article made me wonder what kind of effect the tabloid attention would have an affect on the public's opinion of Obama. I was shocked, however, when over a week went by before I heard anything about it. I thought, for an instant, that maybe Americans had written it off.

That hope quickly dissolved when Obama's minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pictured and briefly mentioned in the article, became the focus of a media frenzy.

I'm not sure that the Enquirer was what led people to look the radical reverend up (although it may have - the article came out the 1st and ABC first ran the videos of Rev. Wright on the 13th), but whatever the cause, people sure have gone nuts. Videos of the minister's passionate sermons are all over the news and web. Googling Rev. Wright and Obama got 638,000 hits and searching Rev. Wright on YouTube pulled up 1,830 videos. The coverage is what prompted Obama to make his national address concerning race relations in America.

Whatever role the Enquirer played in all the mess that has become the democratic race, I have concluded that tabloids should stick with news about Brittney.