Insight Mag and Fox News Pulls an AP?

It's taken a bit of scrounging around since I don't watch cable television, but print reports appear to indicate that Fox News ran a story on Barack Obama's childhood that traced back to someone close to the Hillary Clinton campaign that originally ran in Insight Magazine. That story all but claims that Obama is a Manchurian candidate.

Okay. Sure. Whatever. I don't buy it. Obama may be a lot of things, but I don't think his childhood education in Indonesia prepped him in this fashion. From the Insight piece:

In Indonesia, the young Obama was enrolled in a Madrassa and was raised and educated as a Muslim. Although Indonesia is regarded as a moderate Muslim state, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today most of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims.

Although the background check has not confirmed that the specific Madrassa Mr. Obama attended was espousing Wahhabism, the sources said his Democratic opponents believe this to be the case—and are seeking to prove it. The sources said the opponents are searching for evidence that Mr. Obama is still a Muslim or has ties to Islam.

Set aside the fact that Obama didn't exactly have the ability to pick and choose where he could go to school - he was only a young child when his parents were living in Indonesia.

Who exactly are the sources?

Anonymous of course. So typically Washington Beltway.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz claims that they could not verify any of the information in the original story. Insight responds saying that Kurtz is full of it. The WaPo claims that they sent a reporter to Indonesia to track down the story and see whether it could check out and were unable to do so.

The key here is not Obama's religion - though that will certainly play to certain audiences that might be uncomfortable with a Muslim seeking the Office of the President of the United States at a time when Islamic terrorists are repeatedly calling for attacks on the US, but who leaked this story to the magazine in the first place. Is it truly someone in the Clinton campaign engaging in early dirty tricks? It wouldn't be surprising to learn that someone close to the Clinton campaign wanted to try and undermine her closest competitor, though the potential to backfire would be tempered by the fact that it occurred so early in the campaign season that few would remember it as November 2008 approaches.

Ed Morrissey also points out the problems with relying upon single sources for salacious stories. He writes:

Obama included his educational history in his memoirs. It seems more than a little irrelevant what kind of school in which his parents enrolled him when he counted his age in single digits. Obama has not lived his life as a Muslim but as a Christian, and received most of his education in American public schools. (Maybe we should be questioning that.) He isn't a stealth Muslim regardless of his middle name or his two-year attendance in a school in Indonesia. Nor does anyone offer any proof that this information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Granted, it sounds like the kind of character assassination that the Clinton team performed in the past, especially James Carville, but unless Gibson has some proof that it came from Hillary's campaign, then he shouldn't have speculated on it on national TV. (I actually heard both broadcasts on Friday and wondered about the sourcing.)

Ed believes that the rumors should remain in the gossip pages. True enough - but given the nature of the media these days, that simply isn't going to happen. The best we can hope for is that these episodes result in the offending news outlet being chastised into reducing their reliance on single sourced/anonymous reporting.

Fox should know better.