When Journalism Runs Amok People Suffer

According to the New York Times, when Forbes published a cover story recently by Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative author, asserting that President Obama is opposed to free markets and traditional American values because he inherited his father’s anticolonial beliefs, all the media tripwires were set off: enthusiastic support by conservative commentators like Glenn Beck, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, and an uproar among liberal bloggers and columnists.

But after a meeting with the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the magazine, which initially defended the article, agreed to a post-publication fact-checking process to see if an apology or a correction was warranted, according to Bill Burton, a White House spokesman. Monie Begley, a spokeswoman for Forbes, said that the magazine’s Washington bureau chief made the decision to check the article in response to the general clamor in the news media.

In one sense, the episode was a cautionary tale for the new media age, which finds traditional media outlets like Forbes responding both to the economic imperatives of the digital age by cutting staff and to the editorial imperatives by bringing in more outside voices — Mr. D’Souza is not a staff writer — and sometimes elevating opinion above rigorous reporting, says writer Tim Arango.

Those efforts are amplified by the country’s coarse political discourse, where everyone has a soapbox to advance theories — buttressed by the truth, or not, in the case of the so-called birther movement, which argues that President Obama is not a United States-born citizen — and facts are fought over as much as ideas.

The magazine issued a minor correction on its Web site, saying that Mr. D’Souza had “slightly misquoted” Mr. Obama from a speech he gave about the BP oil spill. Mr. D’Souza also said that Mr. Obama did not focus in the speech on “cleanup strategies.” Forbes’ correction stated, “Obama’s speech did discuss concrete measures to investigate the oil spill and bring it under control.” The Forbes spokeswoman said that the correction put an end to the magazine’s review of the matter.

The essay in Forbes was adapted from Mr. D’Souza’s book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” which is being published by Regnery Publishing and will be released on Oct. 4. Kathleen Sweetapple, a publicist for Regnery, e-mailed a statement on behalf of Mr. D’Souza, who wrote, “there are a couple of minor errors that are completely inconsequential; what the critics are fuming about are not factual errors but disagreements of interpretation.” In discrediting Mr. Obama’s American-ness, the essay by Mr. D’Souza, seemingly stitched some intellectual heft to what has long been a fringe idea of the far right — that Mr. Obama’s Kenyan roots and Hawaiian boyhood make him a lesser American. Mr. D’Souza offered as evidence Mr. Obama’s support for the Islamic center and mosque project near ground zero, even though the president has gone only so far as to say the developers have a constitutional right to build a mosque. Mr. Gingrich described Mr. D’Souza’s theory as “stunningly insightful,” while an editor at The Columbia Journalism Review called it, “the worst kind of smear journalism.”

One of the most contentious points in Mr. D’Souza’s article was his citation of a transaction by the Export-Import Bank of the United States to finance offshore drilling in Brazil, a deal Mr. D’Souza believes indicates Mr. Obama is more concerned with helping countries that formerly were the domains of colonial powers, rather than Americans. A Forbes fact checker recently contacted the bank to check on the assertion that Mr. Obama supported the 2009 transaction with Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company. Mr. D’Souza asserted that Mr. Obama supported the deal, “not so oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.”

A note written by Kevin Varney, the senior vice president and chief of staff of the bank, and posted in the comments section of Mr. D’Souza’s blog — and verified by a spokesman for the bank — criticized Mr. D’Souza for not contacting the bank before publication. “I received a call yesterday from Nathan Verdi, a fact checker at Forbes, who was calling to fact check your article after it was published. (Is this how journalism works now?)”

In an interview, Mr. Varney explained that the transaction “was begun in 2008 with career staffers and approved in 2009 by five Bush-appointed board members.” Mr. Varney said that to cite the deal as evidence of “an anticolonial, Kenyan ideology” on the part of Mr. Obama is “preposterous, it’s false and it’s wrong.”