Jonah Goldberg sees liberal media bias in the NYT's reporting of Obama's claim that the United States could be considered “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." Goldberg writes:
[I]t's still irksome that the New York Times would report Obama's gaffe about America being one of the largest Muslim countries without providing any debunking or truth-squadding or even statistical perspective of any kind. Can anyone imagine George W. Bush saying something like this and not being instantly corrected and/or mocked for it by the MSM?
Huh? It doesn't seem like a statement that needs any debunking or truth-squadding. Yes, the U.S. does not appear anywhere on the Wikipedia page Goldberg links to, but that's because the page contains a list ranking the Muslim populations of Muslim-majority countries. If you were to add the Muslim populations of non-Muslim majority countries to that list, the Muslim population of the U.S.--which, according to a 2001 study of various estimates by the National Opinion Research Center's Tom W. Smith, is close to 2 million--would put it somewhere around number 30. When you consider that there are close to 200 countries in the world, that means the United States's Muslim population is in the top 15 percent--which I'd say justifies Obama's description of the U.S. as being "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world."
--Jason Zengerle