FAIR - ‘America Was Safer Under Bush’ - Journalists accept GOP’s screwy terrorism scorecard

[TomCADem]

I came across FAIR, which is a magazine that is similar to Media Matters, except that it also publishes a print version. Here is a recent article:

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4019

That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point.

The most prominent example came on Good Morning America (ABC, 1/8/10) during a discussion of the failed Christmas Day “underwear bomb” plot, when former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told anchor George Stephanopoulos: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”

Get that? So-called terrorism expert Giuliani, who can barely finish a sentence without mentioning September 11 (Extra!, 5–6/07), managed to scrub the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history from Bush’s record.

Stephanopoulos failed to challenge the former mayor’s screwball claim. Though he later acknowledged this failure as a “mistake” on his blog (1/8/10), it was not apparently important enough to mention to the roughly 5 million Good Morning America viewers originally subjected to the falsehood.

In addition to the 9/11 attacks, the former mayor’s tally scrubbed from Bush’s watch the September/October 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people, and the two people murdered in the July 2002 attack on the L.A. airport’s El Al ticket counter. Next to 9/11, Giuliani’s strangest omission was the December 2001 “shoe bomb” plot, which was strikingly similar to the incident under discussion—another failed attempt by a passenger to bring down an American airliner headed into the U.S. (New York Daily News, 12/23/01).