McCain’s Islam

Cliff Schecter, an Ohio-based investigative reporter with a new book on “The Real McCain,” collects the candidate’s most egregious misstatements at his “Campaign Silo” website. Most relevant to Revealer readers may be McCain’s total failure to distinguish between Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims. The press has already reported one or two of McCain’s blunders on the question, but the media’s master narrative remains fixed on the idea that McCain is a man who knows his foreign affairs. Slip-ups should be forgiven. But Shecter collects seven instances of McCain emphatically tying Al Qaeda to Iran –despite the deep political and theological enmity between the two. This speaks not just to McCain’s confusion, but to an apparent religious illiteracy in the press — no news organization should have let these statements stand unchallenged. Most did, leaving it to the partisan press to make the problem an issue. That’s good for Shecter, whose work deserves attention, but bad for the media, which is failing those who don’t read the progressive press.