President Obama Misquoted the Bible in Dallas Speech; Did Media Give Him a Pass?
Some are accusing mainstream media outlets of liberal bias for ignoring President Barack Obama's recent erroneous citation of a Bible verse.
Speaking at the funeral service for the police officers killed in Dallas last week, President Obama quoted 1st John 3:18, but in the speech mistakenly cited it as being from the Gospel of John.
"And so I'm reminded of a passage in John's Gospel: Let us love not with words or speech, but with actions and in truth," said Obama, with the White House Press office sending out a version of the speech with an added correction in brackets.
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Mollie Hemingway, senior editor at The Federalist, contrasted the apparent news media silence from the likes of CNN, NPR, and others with how the outlets treated Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's "two Corinthians" mistake from earlier this year.
"But what is the precise passage from the Gospel of John to which he refers? You won't find it, because it's not from the Gospel of John but from an entirely different book of the Bible: The First Epistle of John," wrote Hemingway.
"But also surprising is that the media didn't notice that President Obama had ascribed the passage to the wrong book of the Bible."
NewsBusters, a conservative fact checking website, reported that the New York Times initially included the mistaken citation only to omit it in their Wednesday edition.
"The part about the 'Gospel of John' was taken out of the online version without comment between 5pm and 9pm Tuesday evening, as noted by NewsDiffs," noted NewsBusters.
"Did the paper figure out Obama had flubbed the verse and decided to save him from embarrassment, or did it drop the religious reference for other reasons? If the latter, then why did the paper bother to mention his Scripture quotation at all?"
In January of this year, Trump addressed students at Liberty University. During his remarks, he mistaken referred to Second Corinthians as "two Corinthians," garnering amusement from the audience and ample criticism from mass media.
Some suggested that the mistake was reasonable since in some areas of the English speaking world, like Trump's mother's birthplace of Scotland, the term "two Corinthians" is commonly used.
Nevertheless, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins was blamed by Trump for the mistake. Trump complained that Perkins wrote the scripture reference on a piece of paper for him as "2 Corinthians 3:17."
Perkins explained to CNN that he wrote some notes for Trump for the speech that included a reference to second Corinthians.
"No, I don't dispute it at all. I wrote the scripture reference, which is 2 Corinthians 3:17, which is how it's written," said Perkins in January.
"I'm guilty as charged. That's exactly what I did. I sent him a couple of suggestions of some things he could talk about as a connection point."
