Obama's Real 100 Days Versus The Right's Mythical Version
Summary: As media figures prepare to recognize President Obama's 100th day in office, Media Matters has reviewed coverage since the inauguration and identified numerous myths and falsehoods about the administration and its policies.
As media figures prepare to recognize President Obama's 100th day in office, and presumably assess the administration's performance thus far, Media Matters for America has reviewed coverage since the inauguration and identified numerous myths and falsehoods about the administration and its policies.
MYTH: Obama has weakened our standing abroad
During and following Obama's trip to Europe for the G-20 summit and to Trinidad and Tobago for the Summit of the Americas, conservative media figures frequently mischaracterized Obama's actions and comments to claim they were signs of weakness, continuing the media trend of portraying Democrats as weak on matters of national security and foreign policy:
* During his trip to Europe, Obama at one point stated: "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive." Numerous conservative media figures quickly latched on to these comments, claiming they represented an example of Obama, in Fox News host Sean Hannity's words, "blam[ing] America first" and omitting the next two sentences of Obama's speech, in which he said: "But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what's bad."
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As Obama proposed a Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2010 and announced plans to close the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, media figures have put forth falsehoods and other misinformation as purported evidence that Obama's policies would endanger the United States:
* Media figures have advanced the falsehood that Obama's budget reduces overall defense spending. But as CNN.com noted on April 6, "The proposed overall fiscal year 2010 Defense Department budget is almost $534 billion, or nearly $664 billion when including the costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The current Pentagon budget totals slightly over $513 billion, or almost $655 billion including the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts."
* Further, media outlets have uncritically reported claims that targeted spending reductions within the proposed defense budget, including plans to end funding for the F-22 program and to restructure the Army's Future Combat Systems program, would make America less safe. But during an April 6 press briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that "it was not a close call" to end funding for F-22s once four more jets are constructed and further stated that "the military advice that I got was that there is no military requirement for numbers of F-22s beyond the 187" the military will have once those four additional jets are completed. Moreover, in an April 7 conference call posted by Wired magazine's Danger Room blog, Gates stated that the design of Future Combat Systems vehicles had "not really adequately integrated the lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq" and specifically referenced "the vulnerability of [FCS vehicles'] lighter armor to EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] and IEDs [improvised explosive devices]."
**more at link
