Mitt Romney's Benghazi flub: Is the conservative media to blame?

Conservative outlets have ignored some of President Obama's statements about Benghazi, possibly laying a trap for the GOP candidate

Mitt Romney
(Image credit: Shannon Stapleton-Pool/Getty Images)

At the second presidential debate, Mitt Romney let a factual error botch what should have been an effective criticism of the Obama administration's confusing response to the Benghazi attack. At the debate, President Obama said he described the attack as an "act of terror" on the day after the attack, a comment that Romney pounced upon as if he were on the verge of delivering a knockout blow to his opponent. "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror," Romney expounded, before moderator Candy Crowley interrupted to point out that Obama had, in fact, referred to the incident as a terrorist attack in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Crowley has since been pilloried in the conservative press for allegedly ganging up on Romney.) No one can accuse Romney of showing up to debates unprepared — so how to explain his costly mistake? Some liberals say he's been reading too much conservative media, which has glossed over Obama's actual statements. Is the conservative echo chamber to blame?

Yes. Romney's allies in the media did him no favors: "Conservative media on the Benghazi story have driven at a single data point," says Erik Wemple at The Washington Post: "The misleading statements of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Sept. 16, as she visited multiple Sunday talk shows and cited how the attacks stemmed from spontaneous protests related to an anti-Muslim video. Over and over: Susan Rice, Susan Rice, Susan Rice." The focus on Rice is clearly warranted, but "that style of coverage has made very little allowance for nuance and inconvenient details, like the one that President Obama mentioned on that debate floor."

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