Peter Nicholas

Saturday, David Espo at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, engaged in an execrable exercise in advocacy journalism entitled "Obama Agenda Marches on Despite Controversies."

Yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I took apart Espo's claim that there is a "lack of evidence to date of wrongdoing close to the Oval Office" by showing that in at least five situations -- Fast and Furious, Benghazi, IRS targeting, AP phone snooping, and HHS's shaking down of insurance companies to fund ObamaCare promotions -- have all been known by people who directly report to the President, and are thus just one step away from him. On Sunday evening, the Wall Street Journal reported that in the case of the IRS targeting, it's a lot less than one step (bolds are mine):

Covering Barack Obama's  Monday May 13 press conference for the May 14 edition of the Wall Street Journal, reporters Peter Nicholas and Janet Hook painted the president as above the partisan fray and Republicans as the ones sidetracking Washington from the "plenty of unfinished business" that the president has on his plate just "[f]our months into his new term."

In their 20-paragraph story, "Obama Dismisses Benghazi Claims," Nicholas and Hook seemed particularly interested in the president's charge that the Benghazi focus was all about GOP campaigning and fundraising, even as the veteran reporters left out that shortly after the president's joint press conference, he jetted off to New York City for a closed-door Democratic National Committee fundraiser at a private residence (emphasis mine):

Peter Nicholas of The Wall Street Journal is playing dumb. He played it straight when When Politico’s Mike Allen asked Obama campaign manager Jim Messina “which Republican would have had the best shot at beating your boss?” and Messina said Jon Huntsman.

“We were honest about our concerns about Huntsman,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said at a Politico breakfast event Tuesday. “I think Huntsman would have been a very tough candidate.” This is like praising the last player at the end of the bench.

File the news in this report filed late yesterday afternoon by Michael Calderone and John Cook at Yahoo's Upshot Blog under "D" for Double Standards:

White House reporters mum on Obama lunch, even as papers back transparency

White House reporters are keeping quiet about an off-the-record lunch today with President Obama — even those at news organizations who've advocated in the past for the White House to release the names of visitors.

But the identities of the lunch's attendees won't remain secret forever: Their names will eventually appear on the White House's periodically updated public database of visitor logs.

... The Obama White House began posting the logs in order to settle a lawsuit, begun under the Bush administration, from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which sought the Secret Service's White House visitor logs under the Freedom of Information Act.

... And guess who filed briefs supporting that argument? Virtually every newspaper that covers the White House.

The relentless and fervent pro-Obama bias at the Los Angeles Times is nothing new. (For starters, we've reported on it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) But a front-page article in today's Times (Sun. July 20, 2008) is simply dishonest. The headline reads, "Iraqi president embraces Obama withdrawal plan."

The brute dishonesty is that the Times makes no mention of the fact that a spokesman for the prime minister immediately disputed the story and said comments from Nouri Maliki in a controversial interview in Germany's Der Spiegel magazine "were misunderstood, mistranslated and not conveyed accurately." (See CNN's "Iraqi PM disputes report on withdrawal plan," posted yesterday afternoon (7/19/08). HotAir also reports how Der Spiegel changed a key quote in the interview.)