This was a big catch by Brian Wedemeyer from the Arizona Independent. A Boston Globe reporter hid information on Barack Obama’s father for at least two years as she worked on a novel about the man’s life.
I posted the story on our web site and then watched to see what kind of reaction, if any, there would be. A small part of me wondered if The Independent — something we have worked so hard to establish as a credible and reliable community news source — would be written off as a bunch of crackpots. After all, we’re not even members of the Associated Press. We’re not even the third largest newspaper in mostly rural Mohave County.
Then, a day later, the Boston Globe published its story, written by reporter Sally Jacobs, which included the following:
”The INS documents, released to this reporter through a Freedom Of Information Act request in 2009 in the course of research on a biography of the elder Obama to be released in July, reveal Harvard’s crucial role in the tumultuous course of the president’s father’s life. The documents were made public Wednesday by the weekly newspaper, The Arizona Independent.”
Sally Jacobs is later identified as a member of the Globe staff and the author of “The Other Barack, The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father,’’ to be published in July.
This revelation — that the Boston Globe had these documents since 2009 — could be the biggest story of all, and it certainly has me rethinking the role of journalism in rural America.I can’t help but wonder how many other reporters at the Boston Globe — and other major news outlets for that matter — are working on novels while they are withholding information from their readers?
It’s not the first time the state-run media concealed information on Obama from the public.
It’s probably more common than we realize.
