The video below provides yet more evidence that you can't trust John King and CNN in general. It features a discussion of the Obama citizenship issue with Orly Taitz and former Barack Obama pollster Cornell Belcher. On the video, John King lies, misleads, and smears millions of Americans, and seems to think that the truth and getting his facts straight are crazy.

1. King holds up a barely legible piece of paper and calls it Obama's "certificate of live birth":
- a. The infamous picture on Obama's site - presumably King held up a printout of that - says right at the top that it's a "Certification of Live Birth" ("COLB"). King's colleague Anderson Cooper has also engaged in that subtle attempt to deceive and make people subliminally think that the COLB is what most people think of as a birth certificate.
- b. As with the picture on Obama's site, there's no "chain of custody" for the picture King holds up. For all anyone knows, King could have printed out someone else's COLB and put his own name on it (who knows? see this).

2. King says Obama's family states he was born in Kapiolani hospital, when Obama himself and others have been confused over which he hospital he was supposedly born in. King did not, of course, mention that there's been such confusion over what should be such a simple fact.

3. King pretends that the contemporaneous birth announcements are proof when in fact they aren't. He also claims that that hospital sent out birth notices, when the exact procedure that was involved in birth notices as of 1961 is not clear. I'm not aware of anyone producing contemporaneous records showing how birth notices traveled from hospitals to newspapers, and whether they went through the Hawaii Department of Health first. I'm not aware of anyone producing proof that a birth announcement would only indicate a Hawaiian birth or ruling out submissions by parents done without the involvement of hospitals. It doesn't matter what the rules are today, since the rules of almost 50 years ago are no doubt different. King is trying to mislead his viewers into thinking that the rules in years past were what they are now, and that's no doubt false.

4. King shows a picture of a mult-story apartment building and falsely says that's the address given on the announcements. In fact, the address on the announcements is a single-family home with a guest cottage; a picture is here. The building King falsely states was the one named in the announcements appears instead to be the building Obama lived in years later as a child (picture here).

Taitz, of course, doesn't acquit herself much better than King, playing loose with facts and making unproved allegations. She does challenge King a couple of times, but she doesn't keep coming back to those challenges. Doing so would help show his viewers how much King is misleading. King's only response to Taitz' challenges is to turn to Belcher and portray her statements as crazy.

And, of course, both King and Belcher play the race card, smearing millions of Americans who have perfectly valid questions about Obama's background and who aren't ready to buy the lies sold by King and the rest of the mainstream media.

If those who are smeared with the name "Birthers" would simply concentrate on the facts and on helping discredit those like King we might encourage the mainstream media to do real reporting on this issue instead of constantly lying and misleading.

12/15/11 UPDATE: The earlier video (Youtube ID http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4vZsQtn5iU) was removed, I replaced it with a video of the same segment.