Ha’aretz prominently features a story Monday about Orly Taitz, the woman behind the conspiracy alleging that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and therefore is ineligible to be president.
There’s at least one essential element missing from the story: A rebuttal of the conspiracy theory, which, as anyone who has taken the trouble to review the documentation knows, is baseless.
The story’s author, Benjamin Hartman, describes the allegation as a "campaign," a "movement" and a "phenomenon," but he fails to note that the allegation is false or even mention that the vast majority of Obama opponents dismiss the allegations as nonsense. Instead, Hartman writes that the controversy surrounding the so-called birther movement has been supplanted in the Unites States by the health care debate, as if the Obama birthplace conspiracy theories are being considered with the same seriousness or airtime as the health care debate.
Why is Ha’aretz running a story that lets Taitz have her say — including her charge that an Obama executive order last winter was "a form of political subterfuge meant to prop up the enemies of the United States and Israel" — without any context?
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