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Dont Believe Everything You Read Pt 2

Mixed Media

by Jeff Bercovici
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Sep 12 2007 12:00am EDT

Don't Believe Everything You Read, Pt. 2

A former ABC News consultant is behind a fabricated Barack Obama interview, and guess who has the scoop? Yup -- ABC News.

The interview (or "interview") appeared in a recent issue of a French periodical, Politique Internationale. Obama was quoted calling the Iraq War a "defeat."

The writer, Alexis Debat, is a senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center. He began appearing on ABC News as a counterterrorism analyst in 2001, and continued making appearances up until last June, when the network let him go after learning he had faked his academic credentials.

Debat now claims he was actually the victim, having contracted out the interview to a freelancer named Rob Sherman. He's vowed to sue a French magazine that claimed he has a history of making up stories.

Props to ABC for being the first American outlet to report this...though not so much for putting an apparent charlatan on the air for six years.

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