An Oct. 24 Newsmax article by Kenneth Timmerman promotes Philip Berg’s lawsuit over Barack Obama’s birth certificate and accepts Berg’s argument that the Obama campaign’s failure to respond to the lawsuit means that everything Berg accuses is true.
Timmerman does some token reporting of the other side of the story — citing “respected conservative blogger Ed Morrissey” as calling the Berg lawsuit a “conspiracy theory” and stating at the bottom of the article that Berg’s “credibility was tarnished by work he did for the far-left ‘9/11 for the Truth’ campaign”– but the bulk of the article is dedicted to building Berg’s credibility.
Nowhere does Timmerman note that FactCheck.org found that the birth certificate released by the Obama campaign “meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship,” or that even his right-wing rivals at WorldNetDaily have declared that “WND investigation into Obama’s birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic” and that “Berg’s lawsuit relies on discredited claims.”
That’s shoddy reporting on the part of Timmerman, who has clearly decided how he wants this story to turn out, facts be damned.
UPDATE: A Philadelphia judge has dismissed Berg’s lawsuit, calling Berg’s attempts to use certain laws to gain standing to pursue his claim that Obama was not a natural-born citizen — favorably portrayed by Timmerman — “frivolous and not worthy of discussion.”