The New York Times

Politics

Rivals CNN and Fox News Spar Over Obama Report
Published: January 24, 2007

By BILL CARTER

    A disputed report on the Web site of a conservative magazine about Senator Barack Obama’s childhood schooling kicked off a pointed exchange this week between the rival cable news networks CNN and Fox News when CNN seemed to make an overt effort both to debunk the report and to question the quality of Fox News’s journalism.

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    The original report, posted on the online version of Insight, a magazine owned by The Washington Times, said that as a child in Indonesia, Mr. Obama had attended a madrassa, a school that teaches a radical version of the Muslim faith. Mr. Obama, who spent a few years in Jakarta as a boy, is a Christian.

    Adding to the political volatility of the report was the attribution of the news to “researchers connected to” Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    The two senators are expected to be the leading candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, attracting intense news coverage, and the sparring between CNN and Fox News, which are often described as ideological opposites, may be a prelude to more accusations of inaccurate reporting.

    The back-and-forth also comes amid a backdrop of increasingly nasty competition between the two networks, with CNN trying to promote the quality of its journalism as a counter to Fox’s ratings. Fox continues to command by far the largest news audience in cable television.

    Representatives of Mr. Obama of Illinois and Mrs. Clinton of New York denounced the Insight report, calling it false and an effort by a conservative publication to smear two Democratic contenders at the same time.

    The Fox News Channel discussed the report on two of its programs. It was also picked up by The New York Post, which shares ownership with Fox News, and was discussed by several conservative talk-radio hosts.

    Yesterday, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Howard Wolfson, said in an e-mail message: “This is a textbook example of how the other side works. A right-wing rag makes up a scurrilous charge and prints it with no real attribution. The smear gets injected into the atmosphere and picked up by talk radio. In this case both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton were victimized.”

    A spokesman for Mr. Obama had previously been quoted in The Washington Post as calling the report “appallingly irresponsible.”

    On its Web site yesterday, Insight defended its report, saying, “Our reporter’s sources close to the Clinton opposition research war room confirm the truth of the story.”

    CNN’s political director, Sam Feist, said he had seen the Insight report discussed on “Fox and Friends.” Mr. Feist said he wanted to determine the validity of what he said, if true, would be a “holy-cow political story” so he sent a correspondent, John Vause, to Jakarta from Beijing. Mr. Vause’s report, broadcast Monday on CNN, described the Jakarta school as unaffiliated with Islamic fundamentalism. The school headmaster said it was a “public school” that did not “focus on religion.”

    The president of CNN US, Jon Klein, said that his network’s report was “not a response to Fox per se, though they did seem to relish repeating the Insight-reported rumor without bothering to — or being able to — ascertain the facts.”

    In its report, CNN included a clip from the Fox News program “The Big Story With John Gibson.” Mr. Gibson interviewed a Republican political strategist about Mrs. Clinton’s reported role in the Obama rumors. As Fox News has in every story on the madrassa accusations, Mr. Gibson used the attribution “according to Insight magazine.” But he also said: “Look at what some anti-Obama Democrats are doing to her political rival now. They are playing the Muslim phobia card.”

    On Monday, the hosts of “Fox and Friends” said they wanted to clarify earlier comments after Mr. Obama’s office contacted the show, declaring its report “absolutely false.”

    In comments after Mr. Vause’s report, the CNN anchors Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper seemed to chide others for not practicing legitimate journalism on the story. “CNN did what any serious news organization is supposed to do in this kind of a situation,” Mr. Blitzer said. “We actually conducted an exclusive firsthand investigation inside Indonesia to check out the school.”

    Mr. Cooper said: “That’s the difference between talking about news and reporting it. You send a reporter, check the facts, and you decide at home.”

    A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, said CNN was mainly looking for publicity in attacking its higher-rated rival. Of Mr. Cooper’s comment, she said, “Yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news, Anderson Cooper.”