(OMG, people are complaining. Quick, change that article before more people notice! - promoted by johne)
After Colorado Media Matters pointed out that the Rocky Mountain News inaccurately stated Sen. Barack Obama holds "both American and Kenyan (since 1963) citizenship," the News deleted the sentence from its online article. But the newspaper offered no indication to readers that it had done so and provided no statement in print or online to explain the false statement contained in the original article.
Following an August 11 Colorado Media Mattersitem pointing
out that the Rocky
Mountain News published an article stating inaccurately that
Sen. Barack Obama holds dual citizenship in the United States and Kenya, the News deleted the sentence from its August
6 online article,
but provided no indication on the
page as of midday August 12 that it had done so. The News also provided no statement in its
print edition or on its website explaining to readers how the original article -- which had generated more than 120 reader-posted
"comments" as of August 12 -- was factually inaccurate.
As Colorado
Media Matters noted, the August 6 online News article,
headlined "Things you might not know about Barack Obama," repeated
a claim that Obama has been a dual citizen of the United States and Kenya since
1963, but provided no evidence beyond listing as its sources for the article
the Internet
Movie Database (IMDB), Biography.com,
and the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution.
The article, which had no byline,
printed verbatim from the IMDB profile
for Obama the entry: "Holds both American and Kenyan (since 1963)
citizenship." IMDB did not cite a source for its information -- which it
listed under the heading "Trivia" -- but according
to the U.S.
Department of State, "Kenya
does not officially recognize dual nationality." Moreover, Kenya's constitution
explicitly prohibits
dual citizenship and nullifies Kenyan citizenship of any 21-year-old who is
also the citizen of another country and who has not formally renounced
citizenship of that other country.
Since the News posted the August 6 online article listing the assertion about Obama,
the dual-citizenship claim has been repeated by conservative blogs such as Gateway
Pundit and FreeRepublic,
citing the News as the source of
the information.
Further,
the News' web page featuring the article noted that it had logged more than 120 online comments from readers as of midday on August 12, making it
one of the site's "[m]ost [d]iscussed" articles as of that time.
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