Lies smears and whispering campaigns have always been part of the fabric of politics, but if you had to trace this digital era’s "fake news" phenomenon to its roots, you’d go back to the early days of Barack Obama’s campaign for president and to the persistent rumor that he was a secret Muslim.
The rumor festered in the fever swamps in late 2006, got a boost from Fox News in January of 2007, and then seemed to fade — only to persist and grow through email forwards and talk radio chatter, to twist itself into a new form as a claim about Obama’s birth certificate, and to lead in a direct of twisted way to the elevation and ultimately election of Donald Trump.
But back in 2007, the Muslim whispers were a specific challenge to two groups: The Obama campaign; and the reporters covering him. And on this week’s Newsfeed with BuzzFeedBen, I talked to David Axelrod, the chief strategist for that campaign, about the difficult and new decisions we all faced.
Politics was beginning then to be truly shaped by the internet, and it was for many of us this first hint two old rules no longer applied: that the notion that news organizations could serve as gatekeepers and suffocate rumors by ignoring them; and that campaigns could keep lies in check by, as they used to say, refusing to dignify them with a response.
“You do get to a point where you make judgements as to whether this is seeping into the public consciousness in a way that is threatening to the enterprise and you make a decision about whether there’s more to lose by not talking about it than talking about it,” Axelrod recalled.
Back then, reporters spent a lot of time debating the same questions. We’d all gotten the email forwards — many from our friends and relatives outside politics — about Obama’s faith, and talked to Iowans and South Carolinians at political events who had questions about his religion. We also knew it was nonsense, and we were receptive to the campaign’s outrage at any suggestion of writing about the rumor, even to debunk it.
“Our interest was in not ramping up that story by giving it more exposure,” Axelrod said.
The campaign was not particularly pleased, as I recall, when Jonathan Martin and I broke with that convention in Politico in October of 2007, to report that on the myth about Obama’s faith. We traced the rumor then to a column by the anti-Muslim writer Debbie Schlussel, who wrote a column called, Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim.
“I had a lot of readers ask me about Barack Obama and his background, and a lot of them had heard he was a Muslim or thought he was a Muslim,” she told us. “I looked into it, I found out his middle name was Hussein.”
The viral medium them wasn’t Facebook. It was mostly, as Dave Weigel and Chris Hayes noted at the time… email forwards.
Those online rumors had translated in early 2007 into a Fox News report suggesting that Obama had been educated in a “madrassa” in Indonesia.
The campaign responded furiously, and CNN sent a crew to Indonesia that debunked the story. That seemed, indeed, to put the conversation to rest — after all, Obama had written and talked at length of his Christian faith.
But “rather than vanish, the whispered smear campaign appears to have gone underground, and in its purest form: Obama himself, according to a pair of widely circulated anonymous e-mails, is a Muslim,” we reported back in 2007.
Obama himself “found it exasperating,” Axelrod said. “He had written about his faith, he had told his story a lot of times, he found it hard to understand how people could still accept what was patently not true.”
And by November of that year, the campaign had changed its strategy, putting out a fact-checking website — it seemed novel at the time! — that explicitly engaged and debunked the rumors about Obama’s faith.
This was complicated then, as now, Axelrod recalled by a second consideration: “We didn’t want to dignify the idea that if he was a Muslim that that was something to apologize for.”
The Muslim myth did fade out, replaced seamlessly — if totally irrationally — by whispers about Obama’s birth certificate. And the cycle repeated itself: The Obama White House first ignored the story and discouraged the press from covering it. Then when Donald Trump brought the ludicrous smear into the national conversation, Obama — and much of the media — went through the same cycle of first attempting to ignore it, then being forced to engage.
“That went on for years,” said Axelrod. Finally “out of exasperation he said to [White House Counsel] Bob Bauer…, ‘Would someone just get the damn birth certificate.’”
That question of how to handle a viral falsehood is now one of the central ones in journalism and politics. And Axelrod’s own view is that Democrats, in particular, need to be more aggressive — to “intercept these missiles as they’re launched on social” and “be willing to fight very hard when they surface.”
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