Cri Think

Leung Siu Lai, Shirley

Student ID: 1134171

Section: 2

Information Taken Out Of Context

President Barack Obama: If you’ve got a business

— you didn’t build that!

Description of information:

“Obama: You didn’t build that.” was quoted from a presidential campaign on 13, July at 2012. It is a classic example of comment that being taken out of context. This remark was first quoted by Fox News. After his speech was quoted out, it attracts lots of response and controversies among public. Some think that Obama had offended many small business owners and some think that the meaning of the quote is not what he said, the meaning was mistranslated. Besides, parties such as Romney campaign, conservative group also posted videos to criticize his impolite speed.

Obama was trying to support that wealthy people should pay a higher tax rate in order to serve the public good. The full speech was:

“There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own……”

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

However, after a few days, Fox News quoted one of the sentences, ”If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” It seems that Obama is insulting individual initiative who owns their small business.

The first one who quoted...