Sam Roberts

The New York Times “Caucus” podcast recorded December 1 featured reporter and podcast host Sam Roberts wondering if it was a potentially dangerous tactic” for GOP candidates to insult the Occupy Wall Street movement. This exchange came a minute and a half from the end, after Roberts asked how the Occupy movement’s “99%” slogan was playing out in the Republican primary.

Sam Roberts, who also hosts the New York Times’s weekly political podcast “The Caucus,” had a left-wing take on a study on income disparity in Wednesday’s edition suggesting it justified the left-wing Occupy Wall Street Protest: “As the Data Show, There’s a Reason the Protesters Chose New York.” Included was a graphic on “The New Gilded Age,” with an income disparity chart sourced from the left-leaning Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

Reporter Robert Pear also bought into class warfare in Wednesday’s paper: “It’s Official: The Rich Get Richer,” keyed to a Congressional Budget Office report showing “The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades.” Alongside was a photo of a protester sympathizing with the Occupy Wall Street sit-in by holding an “I Am 99%” sign, with a photo caption concluding hopefully: “A new report may spur the protests.”

Sam Roberts, host of the weekly "Political Points" podcast at nytimes.com, and White House correspondent Peter Baker had an exchange about Karl Rove’s new book “Courage and Consequence,” about six minutes from the end of Thursday’s edition of “Political Points."

Roberts parroted the conventional liberal wisdom about the Bush administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, asking Baker whether the American public deserves an apology from Rove and President Bush for the intelligence failure. It was up to Baker to point out that the idea of Saddam Hussein having WMD was not a view pushed by the White House onto gullible Democrats, adding that many Democrats who looked at the intelligence agreed that Iraq posed a threat.

Sam Roberts: “Peter, let me ask you, let me ask you a question about the “courage” part of that. He says that George Bush would not have invaded Iraq had he known there were no weapons of mass destruction there. Does Karl Rove or the president owe the American public an apology?”