Marti Lotman writes in a Jan. 30 Newsmax article: “The University of Chicago Medical Center has announced plans to turn Ronald Reagan’s childhood home in Chicago into a parking lot for President Barack Obama’s library.”
That’s a complete, utter lie.
As Media Matters explains, while it is true that the University of Chicago Medical Center is planning to tear down a house where Reagan lived for a year when he was 4 years old, there is no evidence whatsoever that it would be torn down for an Obama presidential library — in fact, a location for the library has not even been chosen — and the university certainly did not “announce” it would do what Lotman said it did.
Even the Washington Times Communities article from which Lotman lifted her item never claimed that the university made such an announcement. Rather, it engages in a lot of baseless speculation and cites only unnamed “opponents of the demolition” as claiming it would be torn down for an Obama library — which, again, has not even been awarded to the university as of yet.
Apparently, the idea of Obama trashing Reagan’s legacy was too good for Newsmax to fact-check. Or even to double-check basic reading comprehension.
UPDATE: WorldNetDaily latched onto the bogus story as well, reproducing part of the Washington Times article, presumably without permission.