If Obama Believes Austrian Is a Language, So Will AP

At an April 4 news conference in Strasbourg, France (White House transcript here), President Obama referred to a language that doesn't exist (bold is mine; HT to DrewM at Ace of Spades):

It was also interesting to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate. There's a lot of -- I don't know what the term is in Austrian -- wheeling and dealing -- and, you know, people are pursuing their interests, and everybody has their own particular issues and their own particular politics.

Apparently none of Obama's 12 teleprompters (their existence was cited a week ago at the UK's Evening Standard, and noted yesterday at NewsBusters and BizzyBlog) were able to guide Obama's dialect-challenged utterance in time.

Amazingly, Tom Raum of the Associated Press in effect made the same mistake (HT to an e-mailer) when he cited the above Obama quote and failed to note that there isn't an Austrian language. Raum and who knows how many editors surely had several hours to get it right, and didn't.

For the record, Austria's languages, according to Wikipedia, are "German, locally also Slovene, Croatian and Hungarian."

This is either an example of the lengths to which the press will go to cover for their dear President 'Prompter, or an example of how ignorant the press covering Barack Obama really is. Or a bit of both.

Does anyone think that the establishment media would have let this slide if George Bush had been the one who made this mistake?

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.