Accuracy in Media

Jon
Meacham writes in
Newsweek that Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was “a strong voice for
racial justice” and political activist whose “writings on civil-rights and
labor issues” had “prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American
Activities Committee.” Meacham is suggesting that Davis was the target of false allegations
that he was a communist.

While
he agrees that Davis
was one of Obama’s mentors, Meacham’s handling of the communism angle is about
as dishonest as it gets.

But
at least the name of Frank Marshall Davis is finally getting into print in the
mainstream media. It has taken months to get the truth out. 

In
the first place, as Meacham surely knows, Joseph McCarthy was a senator, not a congressman.
The House committee had nothing to do with McCarthy. Second, Davis was identified as a member of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA), controlled and subsidized by the Soviet Communist
Party and the KGB. As late as 1956, when he was called before the Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee, Davis
was still refusing to deny that he was a communist.

Wouldn’t
it be helpful if Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, would make an elementary
effort to get the facts right? But that is too much to ask when the presidency
is at stake and the media-backed candidate is trying to cover up his
controversial background.

All
of this is of no significance or consequence if you believe that communism has
been a blessing to the planet. But the editors of the Black Book of Communism, which documents about 100 million dead
from this philosophy, would disagree.

And
with Russia back on the
march, a candidate’s connection to an agent and apologist for Soviet Russia
might strike many people as decidedly newsworthy, especially when that
candidate initially refused to condemn Russia
for its invasion of Georgia. 

In
Time magazine,
David Von Drehle is a bit more honest. “Like his friend Paul Robeson and
others, Davis perceived the Soviet
Union as a ‘staunch foe of racism’ (as he later put it in his
memoirs), and at one point he joined the Communist Party,” he writes. Nevertheless,
Drehle faults AIM for trying to paint a “radical” picture of Obama because of
his association with Davis.
He insists that “by the time they [Obama and Davis] met, Davis had been out of politics for decades,
and ‘mentor’ may exaggerate his role in the young man’s life. Still, it’s clear
that Obama did seek advice from the old man and that what he got was
undiluted.”

It
is not a “radical” picture we paint. It is one of closely associating with an
agent of one of the bloodiest and most destructive political philosophies of
human history. 

One
of the key facts that Von Drehle ignores is that Robeson, like Davis, had been a secret member of the
Communist Party USA. Also, by the time they met, 1970, Davis was still active in a CPUSA front
called the American Committee for Foreign Born. So he wasn’t “out of politics
for decades.” There’s no evidence that Davis, who died in 1987, ever stopped
being a communist.

In
any case, with these stories in Newsweek and Time, the six-month major media
campaign to ignore the Obama-Davis relationship is finally over. The admissions
of Davis’s
influence over Obama only confirm what we have been reporting since February.

Our
challenge now, as it has always been, is to demand that they tell the truth―the
full truth. Honest and objective journalism demands nothing less. 

Of
course, one big reason why they are finally acknowledging the basic truth is
that Obama himself admitted that he had a relationship with Davis. The pressure was getting too big to
ignore. Obama did this in the 40-page so-called “rebuttal” to the Jerome Corsi
book, The Obama Nation. The
disclosure was made in the context of claiming, as Meacham tries to do, that Davis was not a communist
but only a civil rights activist. This is a blatant lie.

We
demonstrated in a
previous column that the article quoted by the Obama campaign, supposedly
to prove that Davis
was in favor of social and racial justice, actually included several references
to his involvement in the CPUSA and its fronts. All of these points were
carefully excluded from what the campaign provided to the media and the public.

The
Newsweek and Time treatments, as inadequate and misleading as they are,
actually represent a step forward. The Washington Post on Sunday ran a
10,000-word stunningly dishonest story about Obama growing up in Hawaii that completely ignored Davis’s critical role. The author, David
Maraniss, told us that he had concluded that even Obama had “hyped out of all
proportion” Davis’s
influence over him! Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, insisted that Davis “did not play a
role in really shaping Obama.” He’s covering up even more than the Obama
campaign. This is pro-Obama media bias to a remarkable extreme.

Clearly,
Meacham and Von Drehle don’t buy Maraniss’s fantasy view. While Meacham dealt
with it carefully enough to shield Obama from the big questions, Von Drehle
strayed off the reservation a bit. By letting it slip that Davis was a Soviet apologist, he may have
generated some further interest in this story. Perhaps some readers may even
venture to the AIM website to see what we have in fact been writing about Davis
and Obama. It is not a pretty picture, which is why Obama covered up Davis’s true identity in
his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father. He
obviously did not ever think that a writer for a CPUSA publication, possibly
with inside information, would later identify the mysterious “Frank” as Frank
Marshall Davis.

Judging
by the increasing attacks on AIM and me personally for investigating this
matter, we are getting too close for comfort. But we will not rest until all of
the truth is told. 

The
relationship took on more concern when the London Daily Telegraph reported allegations
that Davis was not only a communist but a sex
pervert and pornographer, and that he smoked dope with Obama’s grandfather,
Stanley Dunham, who had introduced Davis
to Obama when the child was only nine years of age. Dunham and Davis were
drinking buddies.

Obama
admits doing drugs in his youth, and we know that Obama talks about sharing
alcohol with Davis.
Did he share drugs with him too?

Obama,
of course, is not responsible for being put into close contact with this
alleged child molester, alcohol abuser, and pothead. Obama’s growing-up years
were sad and tragic, especially with his black father taking off and his mother
spending much of her time elsewhere. His grandparents tried their best to raise
him. But his grandfather should never have turned Obama over to Davis.

Since
Obama wants to be the president of the United States of America, with
authority over domestic and foreign policies that will affect our daily lives,
we have a right to know the nature of the Obama-Davis relationship and how it
affected his personal life and political philosophy. The media should demand
answers.

What
we already know is not comforting. In addition to the sleazy atmosphere in Davis’s home, where Obama would listen to his “poetry” and
radical diatribes, Davis
attempted to guide Obama’s conduct in life. He told Obama, for example, that
when he went to college he should not believe that [expletive deleted] about
the American way of life. Obama, by his own admission, then attends socialist
conferences and picks Marxist professors as his friends. Then he goes to Chicago and ends up in
the arms of communists and socialists who advance his political career. Davis would have been
proud.

It
would be advisable for the Obama campaign to fully disclose all of the relevant
facts about the Obama-Davis relationship. We need more, not less, information.

But
it appears that the Obama campaign has launched a coordinated attack on those
raising questions that the media won’t touch. The pathetic and deceptive
“rebuttal” to Corsi is one example of this. Another is the increasing
appearance of “progressive” voices, mostly in the form of posted comments, on
conservative-oriented websites. The AIM site, which is open for discussion, has
not been immune to this kind of assault. The attacks don’t usually dispute any
facts but instead launch personal attacks on the authors of investigative
pieces about Obama. Those who want a civil discussion of the legitimate points
made in an article are also attacked. The campaign seems desperate, as if there
is a feeling on the left that the media might eventually have to grapple with
some of these issues, that Obama can’t answer the questions himself, and that
he has to be protected from even dealing with them.   

At
another level, the Obama campaign is now demanding the investigation and
prosecution of a group, known as the
American Issues Project, and one of its donors, because the organization is
running an ad about Obama’s friendly association with Bill Ayers, a major
figure in the Weather Underground Communist terrorist organization. The Obama
campaign insists that the group and the donor are operating illegally. The
American Issues Project is vigorously defending itself.

Even
here, in the case of this supposedly controversial ad, the complete truth is
not being told. It refers to the Weather Underground, which engaged in bombings
of the U.S. Capitol and other places, as an “American terrorist group” when it took direction
from foreign communists in Hanoi and Havana and even had contacts with the
Soviet KGB. An ad
from the Obama campaign, in response, insists that Ayers was only a
“radical,” that Obama denounced Ayers’ crimes, and was only eight years old
when those crimes occurred. But Obama was an adult when he launched his
political career in Ayers’ home. At that point, there was no excuse for
associating with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a Communist
terrorist.

“Some members of the group Ayers
founded even went on to kill police,” the ad said. This is true, but it is only
part of the story. Dohrn herself was implicated in the bombing of a police
station that killed a policeman. In addition, an FBI undercover agent in the
organization has said that Ayers himself had knowledge of bomb-making and knew
about Dohrn’s role in planting the bomb killing the policeman in San Francisco. All of
this was explained in our AIM Report, Blood
On the Hands of Obama’s Terror Associate.

Obama
was only nine years old when he met Davis.
But he spent eight or nine critical and formative years under his tutelage. The
question, however, is not so much when he met Davis or Ayers but how much
influence they had on him, and why, in the case, of Ayers, he would openly
associate with and accept political support from him.

The
key to understanding Obama’s friendly relationship with Ayers is Davis. And we should know
a lot more about Davis
before this campaign is over. Most of the major media will stand in the way of
full disclosure because they believe that the truth can only harm their favored
candidate.  

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