October 25, 2008 03:56 AM UTC

Hosting Philip Berg, KHOW's Boyles and Martino allowed falsehoods about Obama's birth certificate

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Media Matters

On the October 22 broadcast of The
Troubleshooter and the October 23 broadcast of The
Peter Boyles Show, 630

KHOW-AM’s Peter
Boyles and Tom Martino, respectively, uncritically allowed Pennsylvania attorney Philip J.
Berg to repeat the discredited smear that Sen. Barack Obama has not released a
valid birth certificate establishing he was born in the United States and
therefore could be ineligible to run for president. Berg further claimed on
both broadcasts that the copy of Obama’s certification of live birth posted on his campaign website is a
“forgery.” As Media Matters for America repeatedly has documented, the Obama campaign has posted
a copy of Obama’s birth certificate

on its “Fight the Smears” website and reportedly
provided the original document to
FactCheck.org, whose staff concluded in an August 21 post that it “meets all of the requirements from the
State Department for proving U.S. citizenship.” A Hawaii Health Department
official also reportedly confirmed to PolitiFact.com that Obama’s birth certificate
is valid.

Also on Boyles’ October 23 program, Berg claimed that
“about a month ago” Obama “admitted to dual citizenship with Kenya and the United States, according to their campaign website.” Boyles
did not point out that, in fact, Obama’s Fight
the Smears website states, citing FactCheck.org,
that Obama’s father, born in Kenya, “was a British subject whose
citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That
same act governed the status of Obama Sr.’s children. Since Sen. Obama
has neither renounced his U.S.
citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship
automatically expired on Aug. 4, 1982.” FactCheck.org noted the expiration
occurred “auto

On October 22, explaining to Martino
why he filed his lawsuit asking a federal court rule
that Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, Berg characterized Obama’s
campaign for president
as “a fraud on the American public” and “a disgrace by
Obama,” whom he labeled
“a fraud” and “a phony.” Martino then asked him,
“Are they taking your lawsuit seriously? Is that the real reason —
people are saying that’s the real reason he [Obama] went to Hawaii,” to which
Berg replied, “I don’t believe that, because I think it’s too late. He
can’t come up with a birth certificate from Hawaii. If he had it, he would have had it already.” When
Martino asked, “Does he have a birth certificate?” Berg said,
“I’m sure he has one, but where’s it from? I believe
it’s from Kenya.”

Near the end of the interview,
Martino told Berg, “People are very upset with me that I even have you on
the air. They think it’s some kind of heresy, or — it’s more of a religious thing than
anything. It sounds so weird to me.” Martino then addressed his
listeners: “Listen folks, I have all kinds of people on my show. This guy
deserves to be heard. He’s filing a lawsuit that has not been dismissed.”
Martino later added:

And I
think — I have to tell Philip Berg this; I don’t think Philip Berg is a
nut. I think he has a valid lawsuit and deserves to be heard. However, I
personally believe that Barack Obama is a citizen based on the certificate of
live birth. And I think that he is not insane, and he would not try to pull
this off. That’s just my gut. The guy seems like an intelligent guy, and
he seems — I don’t think he would do it. I don’t think at this
level you do something that stupid. Philip, that’s just my feeling.

Berg
made similar remarks the following day on Boyles’ show,
saying, “[R]ight now,
I feel Obama is trying to step on our constitution,” and adding that he
is “100 percent” certain Obama is not a natural-born citizen:
“If he is a natural born-citizen, why hasn’t he done
the simple thing and put up his birth certificate?” Berg also told Boyles
that “[i]n June 2008, a certification of live birth” was “placed onto the Obama campaign’s website. Not by me,
not by anybody that works for me, but by Obama’s people. And that
document is a forgery. It’s been
altered.” Boyles did not ask Berg to substantiate his assertion that the birth certificate posted on the Obama
campaign’s website has been forged and later in his
broadcast stated, “I don’t know what the truth is. I have no clue.”

But as Colorado Media Matters noted
after Berg’s appearance on Boyles’ October 9 program, the Hawaii Department of
Health has confirmed
that the birth certificate the Obama campaign posted
on its website is “a valid Hawaii state birth certificate,” and a
department spokeswoman has called
the speculation about Obama’s citizenship “pretty ridiculous.”
Indeed, even the right-wing website WorldNetDaily reported
on August 23 that a “WND investigation into Obama’s birth certificate
utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic”:

The investigation also
revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was
fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the
certificate scan that weren’t originally there.

As Colorado
Media Matters has noted, on his
October 6 broadcast Martino claimed
without noting contradictory evidence that former Fannie
Mae executives Franklin Raines and Tim Howard — whom he blamed for the
current financial crisis — now serve as “chief” economic advisers to
Obama’s presidential campaign. On
his October 17 broadcast, Martino acknowledged that the assertion was false,
but claimed that he made the inaccurate claim intentionally as part of an
“experiment, as Colorado Media Matters also

noted.

more at colorado.mediamatters.org
-C.H.