Major Newspapers

On Friday, Cass Sunstein, the White House's 56 year-old Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (pictured at right), attempted to disavow a 42-page paper he wrote called "Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay," which recommended that the government reduce resources directed at benefitting the elderly in favor of increasing what goes to young people, because young people have more years of life ahead of them. His statement, as carried at CNS News:

“I’m a lot older now than the author with my name was, and I’m not sure what I think about what that young man wrote,” he said. “Things written as an academic are not a legitimate part of what we do as a government official. So I am not focusing on sentences that a young Cass Sunstein wrote years ago.

So, dear readers, before you go to the rest of this post, guess how "young" Sunstein was when he engaged in his de facto "death panels" advocacy.

... Ready? Okay, here goes:

In a May 26 New York Times op-ed piece entitled "America's Forgotten Liberal" (HT Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), Rick Perlstein opened by telling readers that "January was the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth."

Oops. Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911.

Here's a graphic capture of Perlstein's first two paragraphs:

Poynter Institute's Jim Romenesko wrote yesterday about how the editor of the Annapolis Capital sought to apologize to readers for a gauzy article about a lesbian couple that ran on Mother's Day.

Only his colleagues in the newsroom pressured him not to publish it, at least not in his original draft form:

Imagine if the Bush 43 administration had decided to exclude a newspaper's reporters from full access to presidential events--regardless of the ostensible reason. Does anyone believe that the New York Times or Associated Press would have ignored the story?

Well, in a thoroughly predictable but nonetheless sad development, that is what has happened since the Boston Herald's Hillary Chabot reported that "The White House Press Office has refused to give the Boston Herald full access to President Obama’s Boston fund-raiser today, in e-mails objecting to the newspaper’s front page placement of a Mitt Romney op-ed, saying pool reporters are chosen based on whether they cover the news 'fairly.'" Lachlan Markay relayed Chabot's item at NewsBusters yesterday, and also chronicled several previous examples of White House mistreatment, maltreatment, and abuse of disfavored media members.

A search of the Associated Press's main site late this morning on "Boston Herald" (without quotes) returned nothing relevant, as seen after the jump:

"Today on the program, we'll ask whether Americans are losing the skills of true debate and with it a central pillar of this democracy," BBC's Jonny Dymond informed listeners of the May 15 "Americana" podcast.

Yet when it came to Dymond's guests, there was no dissent from the liberal line. 

Take guest  Charles Pierce, a Boston Globe columnist and author of "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free."

During his segment, Pierce decried the state of debate in America over global warming lamenting that "it is impossible to accept the reality of global climate change and get nominated in the Republican Party."

Today marks 174 years that the Baltimore Sun has been in print. As part of their celebration, the Charm City broadsheet has an "Historic Baltimore Sun front pages" feature that includes a mix of momentous events in Baltimore, American and world history such as the 1904 fire, the Lincoln assassination, and D-Day.

But it's also a feature that's capped off with two gushy Obama-related front pages.

Just barely a year after it derided the establishment media's obsession over oil-affected birds in the Gulf of Mexico while virtually ignoring the loss human life in awful floods in Tennessee (noted at the time at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Investors Business Daily's editorialists are calling out the press for oversaturating us with Obama-OBL victory lap coverage at the expense of informing the nation about the severity of this year's horrible Mississippi River flooding.

IBD makes great points in the following excerpts (bolds are mine):

Yesterday the Montgomery County [Md.] Council passed into law a 5-cent tax on plastic and paper bags dispensed by  "nearly all retail establishments, not just those that sell food" within the county.

"Among the few exceptions are paper bags from restaurants and pharmacy bags holding prescription drugs," Post staffer Michael Laris noted in his page A1 story.

But Laris left out one huge exemption to the bag tax of concern to the reader: newspaper sleeves like the ones that subscribers of the Post get their daily papers delivered in.

The New York Times's supposedly momentous decision to omit "Mr." from references to Osama bin Laden in its Monday obituary is apparently working to distract critics from the item's other problems.

Along with Michael T. Kaufman, Kate Zernike, whose primary vocation seems to be finding racism in the Tea Party movement where none exists and otherwise smearing its participants, comes off as almost critical of how bin Laden was "elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin."

Imagination ("the faculty ... of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses")? Babe, I don't know about you, but we didn't imagine September 11. We saw it. Others directly experienced it. Many died. Do you remember?

The obit's topper for me is the (in my opinion) deliberate historical revisionism in the following passage (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Not waiting for history to play out, a New Times caption writer, below a picture of celebrants of Obama Bin Laden's demise outside the White House, has written: "As crowds gathered outside the White House, there was little question that Mr. Obama's presidency had forever been changed."

The pic and caption follow the jump.

Yesterday evening (late afternoon West Coast time), Phil Bronstein at the San Francisco Chronicle informed his readers that one of its reporters had been banned by the Obama administration:

The hip, transparent and social media-loving Obama administration is showing its analog roots. And maybe even some hypocrisy highlights.

 

White House officials have banished one of the best political reporters in the country from the approved pool of journalists covering presidential visits to the Bay Area for using now-standard multimedia tools to gather the news.

Gosh, after Republican Governors Scott Walker and John Kasich succeeded in championing legislation curtailing many collective bargaining rights of unionized state and municipal employees in Wisconsin and Ohio, respectively, the establishment press had the meme all set. The GOP, conservatives, and Tea Partiers are enemies of labor and the middle class, while Democrats, liberals, and progressives are their champions.

Then along comes bluer-than-blue Massachusetts. As the Boston Globe reports, the Bay State's House "voted overwhelmingly last night (Tuesday) to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns." It's not a law yet, but it seems to be heading pretty quickly in that direction.

The Associated Press's beat reporters and editors must be beside themselves. 

It's always a bit of risk saying that a bunch of supposedly smart folks are wrong, but the economists Jeannine Aversa at the Associated Press consulted for a Tuesday afternoon report on the economic outlook must be taking a double dose of sunshine pills every day.

If we are to believe these folks, the only thing that can stop the economy now is oil -- not the $112 a barrel accompanied by $4 per gallon gas we're seeing now. That's noooo problem. These smarties apparently think it's clear sailing ahead for the economy as long as oil doesn't go to $150, which would translate to at least $5.50 a gallon.

Here goes, if you can stand it:

AP survey: Only oil shock can stop economy now

The New York Times announced its first quarter 2010 results on Thursday. As is the case with most companies when they would rather not talk about the bottom line, the Times instead concentrated on its "operating profit."

A detailed look at the release reveals a group of contracting, money-losing journalistic endeavors propped up by an also-shrinking Internet enterprise.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the company's release:

Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but in late August 2010 Ben Bernanke took on complete responsibility for everything -- especially everything mediocre or bad -- that occurs in the economy.

I know this because on August 27 and 28 (covered here and here), the Associated Press issued three reports essentially telling readers that it was up to Ben to save us. There wasn't anything Barack Obama, Tim Geithner, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or then-present Larry Summers could possibly say or do to improve the economic situation, described at the time as "appears to be stalling" in one of those AP items.

Out of this came what has come to be known as "QE2" (the second round of "quantitative easing"), otherwise known as "electronically printing money to buy U.S. debt because possibly no one else will."

Well, it hasn't worked out so well, according to the New York Times, whose Binyamin Appelbaum reported the "surprisingly" pathetic results on Sunday:

On Monday, the New York Times assembled a panel of alleged experts in its Room For Debate section. Each weighed in on Monday's ratings agency outlook downgrade by Standard and Poor's in an item entitled "Is Anyone Listening to the S.&P.?" (Don't ask me why "the" is there. It shouldn't be; the item is about the firm Standard and Poor's, not "the" Standard and Poor's stock index.)

One of the contributors was Yves Smith. Ms. Smith "writes the blog Naked Capitalism. She is the head of Aurora Advisors, a management consulting firm, and the author of 'Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism.'"

Wait until you read Ms. Smith's reaction to S&P's move after the jump (bold after title is mine):

As night follows day, the press is beginning to go after a business entity which had the nerve to do its job and call attention to Uncle Sam's dire fiscal situation.

Standard and Poor's is presumably not 100% populated with angels, but it didn't deserve the gratuitous and ignorant shots fired at it this evening by the Associated Press's Bernard Condon and an "expert" he quoted. In attempting to tar the firm, Condon acted as if the mortgage-lending mess was the creation of "banks" which marketed mortgage-backed securities and asleep at the switch ratings agencies. He didn't once mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the fiasco's Democratic crony-run uber-culprits, which for 15 years consistently deceived the markets about the quality of the already marginal loans underlying the securities they issued .

Here are selected paragraphs from Condon's cracked creation, including a headline which gives away a resentment that the ratings agencies are still actually able to do what they were designed to do (bold is mine):

Whoever is compiling a list of what journalists really believe when they put forth certain vague but commonly used phrases (e.g., using "some people believe" instead of truthfully saying "in my opinion") should consider adding the following: "small but vocal group" really means "a tiny bunch of people I agree with."

That's my assessment as I look at two uses of the term this past weekend, each referring to pathetically small gatherings of people using tax-filing weekend as a excuse to protest "corporate tax loopholes."

The first comes to us via David Roeder of the Chicago Sun-Times (HT JammieWearingFool via Instapundit), where the paper's headline writers cooked up something that would give those who didn't read the underlying report the impression that the city's Tea Party Tax Day protest was small:

Last Friday the Maryland House of Delegates passed a bill granting in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. The bill had already cleared the state senate and Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has said he will sign the bill.

Today's Baltimore Sun devoted sympathetic front-page coverage to illegal immigrants who now "celebrate the approval of in-state tuition for Maryland students regardless of immigration status."

"I want to be a part," blared the front-page headline to Nick Madigan's A-1 story.  Below the headline is a picture of  "Missael, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who lives in East Baltimore."

"Obama aims for the middle on taxes and spending."

That's the headline the San Francisco Chronicle gave Washington bureau staffer Carolyn Lochhead's write-up this afternoon following President Obama's "belated embrace of his commission's recommendation to cut $4 trillion in deficits over the next 12 years."

"Even as he reached back to his 2008 campaign lodestar with a reference to Abraham Lincoln, Obama pivoted sharply to a new mantra of 'balance' and 'shared sacrifice,' citing his Democratic predecessor and budget-balancer, former President Bill Clinton," Lochhead gushed.

Two paragraphs later Lochhead noted that "Obama threw down the gauntlet to Republicans, vowing, 'I refuse to renew them again.'"

How exactly is that centrist rhetoric?

Clearly annoyed with conservative moves to cut the federal budget and, I suppose, with the success of conservative voters and the gun rights lobby, USA Today religion writer Cathy Lynn Grossman penned an odd entry entitled "Budget battles: Granny, get your gun," excerpted in full below:

Last Friday, in what one would think would be a bombshell story headlined "Foreign Banks Tapped Fed’s Secret Lifeline Most at Crisis Peak," Bloomberg's Bradley Keoun and Craig Torres reported that foreign banks secretly and routinely tapping the Federal Reserve's "discount window" lending program, primarily in 2008 and 2009. Some specifics:

• "(The) loans protected a lender to local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya."
• Dexia SA (DEXB), based in Brussels and Paris, borrowed as much as $33.5 billion through its New York branch ..."
• "Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc, taken over in 2007 by a German real-estate lender later seized by the German government, drew $24.5 billion."
• "...foreign banks ... (accounted) for at least 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed during the week in October 2008 when use of the program surged to a record."

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke fought for two years to keep the information secret after Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2009. The Bloomberg report quotes Bernanke as claiming in April 2009 that disclosure "might lead market participants to infer weakness."

In the Bloomberg report, Congressman Ron Paul is quoted making a prediction that has sadly been way off the mark:

Via William Jacobson, at his influential  LegalInsurrection blog.

Let's call it a case of unintentional honesty, or as Bill Jacobson described it, a classic "Freudian slip."

In its article reporting President Obama's announcement of his 2012 re-election campaign, the Los Angeles Times gave the URL address for the official Obama campaign website as: http://latimes.com.   Too true!

View Bill's screen capture, grabbed before the LA Times could change it, after the jump.

The media are hard at work spinning today's jobs report for maximum political advantage for the White House.

Witness Los Angeles Times reporter James Oliphant, who has filed an article for publication in tomorrow's paper entitled, "Drop in unemployment doesn't mesh with Republicans' script."

Here's how Oliphant opened his April 2 story: