Barbershop II — Not the movie!

Once again, from the Daily Howler, just in case you aren’t reading it yourself everyday as you should:

On page one, above the fold, Rachel Swarns reports on black voters’ reactions to Barack Obama. In paragraph 5–above the fold–she prints this remarkable paragraph:

SWARNS (2/2/07): ”When you think of a president, you think of an American,” said Mr. Lanier, a 58-year-old barber who is still considering whether to support Mr. Obama. ”We’ve been taught that a president should come from right here, born, raised, bred, fed in America. To go outside and bring somebody in from another nationality, now that doesn’t feel right to some people.”

That paragraph appears above the fold on page one of today’s New York Times’ front page. Again, it raises the anthropological question: Are we Americans smart enough to conduct the most basic journalism?

What’s so remarkable about that paragraph? In it, Swarns quotes a 58-year-old barber as he makes a string of counterfactual claims about a White House candidate. What does this barber seem to say? He seems to say that he is concerned because Obama is not “an American.” He seems to say that Obama is “from another nationality.” And he seems to say that he is concerned because Obama wasn’t “born, raised, bred, fed in America.” These statements appear without challenge or comment. And all of these claims are just false.

Duh! Barack Obama was born in America; otherwise, he couldn’t serve as president. And Obama was “raised, bred and fed in America,” except for a four-year period (ages 6-10) when he lived with his mother in Indonesia. Meanwhile, is Obama “an American?” Is he “from another nationality?” The latter phrase has various meanings, but Obama plainly is an American; he has been an American citizen since the day of his birth. But uh-oh! Given the rest of the quoted material, a reader of Rachel Swarns’ fifth paragraph may well come away thinking different.