-By Warner Todd Huston
In some of its reports on Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD), the Associated Press chose to edit one of President Obama’s own gags. The AP strangely edited out the word “Muslim” in one of Obama’s self-referential jokes.
Early in his comments on April 26, President Obama made reference to his young life with a joke and a visual image projected on the video screen.
The President joked that everyone loves Michelle and mentioned that she has even appeared on magazine covers. The President said he also appeared on a magazine cover and showed a humorous mock magazine cover on the video screens. The faux cover showed the President golfing on the cover of “Senior Leisure.”
President Obama then said, “These days I look in the mirror and have to admit, I’m not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that I used to be. Time passes, you get a little gray.”
This joke must have been too insensitive for the AP in some of its reports, however.
In one version of the night’s story (as seen at Huffington Post, Time Magazine, Breitbart Wires, the Ottawa Citizen, and The Columbian to name a few), the AP’s Bradley Klapper made a little edit to the President’s joke.
“I’m not the strapping young Socialist that I used to be,” the president remarked, and then recounted his recent 2-for-22 basketball shooting performance at the White House Easter Egg hunt.
What happened to the word “Muslim”? Apparently it was all too much for the AP.
Interestingly, in other versions of Klapper’s story the word Muslim does appear.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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