16-Year Fact-Checking Error Responsible For Obama Lit Agency Claiming His Birth In Kenya

The Omedia has universally condemned every politician, pundit, blogger or citizen who has asked questions about "who is Barack Obama", including his place of birth and his natural born citizenship status for the past four years. Breitbart continues the vetting process of "Hope and Change" that never took place during the 2008 presidential campaign. It uncovered a booklet first published by Obama's literary agent in 1991 that claimed the Hawaiian-born "natural born citizen" was actually born in Kenya. That fact-checking error persisted for the following 16 years when the literary agent's website was finally revised in April, 2007, two months after The One announced that he was running for president that he really was born in Hawaii and not Kenya. The literary agent, Miriam Goderich, put out a statement through one of her firm's other clients, Political Wire's Taegan Goddard, after the Drudge Report led most of the day yesterday with the heading "Born In Kenya":

"You're undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me -- an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

Breitbart went to great length to emphasize that it was not a part of the so-called "birther" conspiracy movement, a derisive term collectively used to describe any one who questions either where Obama was born or whether he can legally be considered a natural born citizen even if born in Hawaii because his father was a British citizen at the time of his birth and because a U.S. Supreme Court opinion from the late 19th century once took the view that only children born to U.S. citizen parents are considered natural born citizens. Breitbart's view is that Obama was in fact born in Hawaii but that Obama once claimed a birth in Kenya because it made for a more interesting bio when he was promoting his book; only when he decided that he had a realistic chance of becoming president did he decide to nail down his true origins to put to rest any doubts for that technical eligibility requirement of the U.S. Constitution.

The Omedia universally ignored the latest revelation by Breitbart promoted to top billing status by the Drudge Report and instead focused on a New York Times report that a SuperPAC funded by Ameritrade's Joe Ricketts, owner of the Chicago Cubs, planned to spend millions emphasizing Obama's ties to his former controversial minister, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who we recently learn had been offered a $150,000 bribe by one of Obama's closest Chicago friends, Dr. Eric Whitaker, to remain silent during the 2008 presidential campaign when his controversial political views became the center of attention. The Omedia managed to put Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on the defensive for the message of a SuperPAC over which he has no control.

And so this is how it goes with every unanswered question about Obama's origins. Move along, folks. There's nothing to see here. Answers about who Obama truly is will be made available to you on a need to know basis. His life really is just too complicated to understand. It's a work in progress--a composite character, if you will, subject to updates as new information becomes available. Why should any one be curious about how his literary agent could have gotten a critical part of her client's bio so wrong? How did the fact-checking error make it past the client's review? How did the fact-checking error of Obama's literary agent play a role in fostering the "Born In Kenya" conspiracy theory? Or how it was possible for this critical fact-checking error to persist for a 16-year period until months after the client officially became a presidential candidate before it was discovered? Getting his place of birth wrong wasn't the literary agent's only factual error. Obama was not the first African-American law student to head up the Harvard Law Review contrary to popular myth. Yet the same media folks fret over questions about George W. Bush's National Guard status, the true birth mother of Trigg Palin and Mitt Romney's teen-aged bully days.

UPDATE: Powerline has this spot on reaction to the literary agent's supposed fact-checking error from someone who has worked in the field:

IF YOU WANT A LITERARY AGENCY THAT WILL LIE FOR YOU OUTRAGEOUSLY TRY DYSTEL AND GOEDERICH

A limp statement was squirted out yesterday after the Breitbart item appeared that a woman who worked at the time as a low level assistant at Acton and Dystel, then Obama’s agent (and is now the Goederich who is Dystel’s partner) was now taking full responsibility for making an “error.”

As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE.

It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?

NEVER.

After all where do the bios come from? We don’t make them up. And neither did Dystel & Goederich. They come from the authors, like Obama. No one has ever invented a detail like that, and the authors usually review them and scream like hell if we get them wrong.

Can Dystel and Goedrich show us the correction appeal letter they got from Obama about the Kenya birth in over 10 years of using this bio? Or any other incident from any other publisher or agent that is similar to this “error?”

I really don’t care where Obama was born. The continued degeneration of the press in passing on hilarious nonsense as fact is a lot more serious problem. Give Dystel & Goederich the Rose Mary Woods Memorial Award for the Most Absurd Lie to Protect a President of the Year.

Thomas Lipscomb 

Senior Fellow

Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC)