An Update on PBS Covering for Obama

Timothy Birdnow

Last month I wrote a piece for American Thinker about PBS efforts to cover for the President. http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/09/pbs_alters_transcript_to_hide_obama_gaffe.htmlMr. Obama made a gaffe in his jobs speech, claiming Abraham Lincoln was "Founder of the Republican Party" and noted that PBS ran a "transcript" without those words. It started a minor firestorm on the internet, making the Drudge Report, Instapundit, Big Journalism, even Fox News and ABC.

Well...
http://www.pbs.org/ombudsman/2011/09/the_perils_of_posting_transcript_vs_text_1.html

I just came across this; the PBS people were obviously quite miffed at gettting caught protecting Obama.

There are several major pieces of bull in here, including that they weren't paying attention on a slow news day (911 weekend, with a serious terror alert?), that they claimed this was a prepared text (there was no mention; it was called a transcript and nothing more), that they corrected it as soon as they learned the error (according to a number of readers of a number of websites, comments left pointing this out were being deleted, and the correction was not added until mid Saturday afternoon, at the peak of the brouhaha.) Also, I have my doubts about Obama's ad-libbing; he doesn't do that. Perhaps they changed the text after releasing the original, maybe, but it still doesn't explain the other errors made by the BHO that WERE in the speech.

Also, notice how the ombudsman dismisses it as "blowing out" without explaining that 911 overshadowed it (I knew it would), thus suggesting that people realized it was not a credible criticism. And to blame it on a simple mistake - right! They were all over Sarah Palin's "Paul Revere's Ride" statements and this:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/on-politicians-calling-lincoln-the-founder-of-the-republican-party/

“He gives a good speech, but he’s loose with the facts. He called Abraham Lincoln the ‘founder’ of the Republican Party. Nope. Lincoln was not the founder of the party; he wasn’t even the first Republican nominee (John Fremont was, in 1856). Lincoln was, of course, the first Republican to be elected president.”
- Jay Carney, TIME Magazine bureau chief, on Mike Huckabee’s GOP Convention Speech, September 3, 2008