Anne Gearan of The Washington Post reported Friday that the Obama administration paid $70,000 to buy ads on Pakistant television disavowing the “Innocence of Muslims” video on YouTube in an attempt to defuse street protests. “Since our founding, the United States has been a nation of respect, that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” Obama says in the ad, which is stamped “paid content.”
This is a different kind of political ad, with an important U.S. government goal. But will it draw scrutiny from Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler, a former State Department correspondent for the Post? It can’t be accurately stated that Obama and his financial supporters (ahem, Bill Maher) have rejected “all efforts to denigrate” Christians. [Ad below]
Online, the Post featured another video the State Department is distributing on YouTube displaying Americans on the street disavowing attacks on religions as unrepresentative of pluralistic America, once again without any cutaways to Bill Maher wisecracks about which Christianity-soaked "red state" is the dumbest. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that "the U.S. government had solicited some of the recorded comments to illustrate U.S. tolerance."
