At a time when Trump-hating media is willing to create fake news to make him look bad, a story has emerged about making Barack Obama look good.
In 2005, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama was attending a Congressional Black Caucus meeting with Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan, when Washington reporter Askia Muhammad snapped a picture of the two men standing side by side.
But the photo (pictured above) never saw the light of day.
Muhammad explained to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that he felt “honor-bound” to hand the photo over after a Black Caucus staff member asked for it.
“The thought was Minister Farrakhan and his reputation would hurt someone trying to win acceptance in the broad cross section,” the photographer explained.
Journalism ethics professor Dr. Stephen Perry of Regent University says that decision is a clear violation of a journalist’s code of ethics.
“How you can get away with having a picture that is totally material to the election and not releasing it,” he asks, “and to follow the request of political people to hide the truth as a journalist? I don’t know how you keep your job.”
Farrakhan is known for his blistering anti-White and anti-Semitic speeches, earning him an “extremist” mention by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center for his Black Separatist beliefs that blame Jews for the slave trade and Jim Crow laws, among other bizarre views on race, Islam and UFOs.
Muhammad, who kept a copy of the photo for himself, has also stated that Nation of Islam members helped Obama’s senate campaign and worked on his staff in Chicago.
Avoiding a P.R. problem for the then-freshman U.S. senator is similar to his 2003 speech praising Rashid Khalidi, a one-time advisor to the PLO terrorist organization and its leader Yasser Arafat.
Obama’s speech praising Khalidi was video recorded and a copy of it found its way to The Los Angeles Times - which refused to release it during Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008.
Muhammad is currently the news director at a D.C. radio station and two smaller newspapers.
Perry says eleven years later it is almost inconceivable that a reporter would protect the reputation of President Trump that way.
“There’s just a lot more media,” he says, “that tends to want to expose problems about Trump than there is problems, formerly, about President Obama.”
It will likely take another Democrat in the White House, he adds, to see if the media’s new grasp of ethics still holds.
