Michael Dobbs

The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" blog has given Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama three Pinocchios (significant factual error and/or obvious contradiction) for his bogus claim that one of his uncles helped liberate the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.

This is down from the four Pinocchios (whopper!) fact checker Michael Dobbs originally gave the junior senator from Illinois for his Memorial Day misstatement reported by NewsBusters just hours ago.

As Dobbs accurately noted (emphasis added, picture courtesy Washington Post):

Stop me if you've heard this before: McCain, theoretically, might be ineligible for the presidency due to his being born on a naval installation in what was then the Panama Canal Zone.

Oh, that's right, we have heard this. Back in February, as a matter of fact.

No matter to the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs, who recycled the story a full 64 days later in the May 2 paper.

Dobbs breathed new life into the story by citing the April 30 action by the U.S. Senate in passing a nonbinding resolution declaring McCain eligible, in its opinion, for the presidency.

The Washington Post is aligning its Fact Checker with Rich Noyes of NewsBusters. On Saturday's front page, the Inside box reads: "Four Pinocchios! Hillary Clinton has talked of coming under sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia. Our Fact Checker shoots that tale down." In the Michael Dobbs "Fact Checker" feature, four Pinocchios means not just fact-shading or exaggerating, but "Real whoppers." (It wasn't prominently featured on the washingtonpost.com home page.) 

Dobbs wrote on Saturday that "Clinton's tale of landing at the Tuzla airport "under sniper fire" simply is not credible. Photographs and video of the arrival ceremony, complete with contemporaneous news reports, tell a very different story. MRC offered up the evidence out of our cavernous video archive. Dobbs offered up his own journalistic travels and other Post reporters in casting grave doubts on her story: