Jackie Calmes

As part of a team of New York Times reporters fact-checking the presidential debate that took place Sunday morning in Concord, N.H., White House reporter Jackie Calmes once again baselessly claimed that expensive Obama-care is actually a money-saver, claiming GOP candidate Mitt Romney was false to assert otherwise. But the history of government cost projections (Medicare, anyone?) strongly suggest Calmes is wrong.

(After the GOP took the November 2010 elections, Calmes confidently stated as fact: “Republicans also say they will try to deny money to put Mr. Obama’s new health care law into effect, though they have not made clear what they would do to make up the cost savings that would be lost if they succeeded in repealing the law.”) Calmes posted Sunday:

The Obama administration blocked over-the-counter sales of Plan B One-Step, the “morning-after” pill, to girls under 17, and New York Times reporters Jackie Calmes (pictured) and Gardiner Harris sniffed out a political move to assuage “conservatives" in Friday’s “Obama Backs Aide’s Stance on Morning-After Pill.”

While the Times mentioned “conservatives” four times in discussing the surprise decision by Kathleen Sebelius, secretary for Health and Human Services, there were zero “liberals” labeled in opposition, merely “women’s rights” groups -- as if all women would favor the sale. And while "anti-abortion groups" were identified, there were no "pro-abortion" or even "pro-choice" groups on the other side, merely harmless "reproductive rights groups."

In Friday’s lead New York Times story, White House correspondent Jackie Calmes again finds the Democrats with political momentum on the policy front, as she has, wrongly, on several occasions in the past, shown by the headline over her optimistic April 2 story, “Jobs Growth Could Stump Obama’s Critics.” (Nope.) This time, it’s Democrats allegedly putting the GOP in a “political bind” over cutting the payroll tax, due to the stubborn refusal by Republicans to raise taxes on "the rich."

Here’s the full headline deck to Friday’s lead story: “Democrats Look To Payroll issue For Upper Hand – Seek Extension of Cuts – Hoping to Paint G.O.P. as Favoring Wealthy – Two Bills Fail."

Double standards on story placement in the New York Times? A “Political Victory” for the White House over trade deals that promise only “small” economic benefits was trumpeted in the headline to Thursday’s lead story, while a “major setback” for Obama and his jobs bill was buried on Wednesday’s inside pages.

The stack of headlines over Thursday’s lead story by Binyamin Appelbaum and Jennifer Steinhauer trumpeted a “Political Victory” for the White House in three trade deals involving South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, though the reporters themselves admitted “The economic benefits are projected to be small.” The headlines: “Trade Deals Pass Congress, Ending 5-Year Standoff – Support Is Bipartisan – Accords With 3 Nations Give Political Victory to White House.” How did the Times determine this story of "small" benefits was the most important news of the day?

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes asked President Obama a softball at Thursday’s press conference about what he would like to say to win over the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, and then followed up: Jackie Calmes follow up question was: "Do you think Occupy Wall Street has the potential to be a tea party movement in 2012?"

Oddly enough, Calmes didn’t use Obama’s answers in her front-page story, headlined “Obama Describes Economy as Dire: Citing Europe, He Urges Passage of Jobs Bill.” Calmes did line up economists to support Obama’s push for passage.Obama said Republican proposals “would not help the economy in the short term. Economists at private-sector forecasting firms agreed,” wrote Calmes.

New York Times White House reporters Jackie Calmes and Jennifer Steinhauer were with Obama on the money-raising trail in Texas and did their usual spin job for the partisan, combative president in Wednesday’s “Obama Pitches Jobs Bill And Appeals to Donors.”

President Obama on Tuesday combined fund-raising and campaigning for his jobs bill in the home state of the Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry and the Congressional district of a House Republican leader, and he did not shy away from telling donors that they and Texas’ oil companies should pay more taxes for the nation’s good.

Stupid white men for the G.O.P.? New York Times White House reporters Jackie Calmes and Mark Landler teamed up for Friday’s front-page campaign preview, “Obama Charts A New Route to Re-election.” In a change from the paper’s standard politically correct approach to race and class, the reporters crudely emphasized that “less-educated, low-income whites” tend to support Republicans. (What happened to "the party of the rich"?)

With his support among blue-collar white voters far weaker than among white-collar independents, President Obama is charting an alternative course to re-election should he be unable to win Ohio and other industrial states traditionally essential to Democratic presidential victories.

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes seemed to like President Obama’s new combative pose over his new big-spending, tax-hiking “stimulus” proposal. Her lead story Tuesday, “Obama Confirms New Hard Stand With Debt Relief,” framed the political battle as a personal conflict as a disrespected president betrayed by House Speaker John Boehner once too often.

With a scrappy unveiling of his formula to rein in the nation’s mounting debt, President Obama confirmed Monday that he had entered a new, more combative phase of his presidency, one likely to last until next year’s election as he battles for a second term.

Sunday’s lead New York Times story by White House correspondent Jackie Calmes pushed the president’s new plan to raise taxes on “the wealthy.” The president, in what the Times seems to think is a bright idea, is calling his proposal the “Buffett rule,” after the billionaire who made waves with his complaint, printed in the Times, that uber-wealthy investors like him were not being taxed enough. Here is the stack of headlines: “Obama Tax Plan Would Ask More Of Millionaires – Called ‘Buffett Rule’ – Populist Sales Pitch to Press the G.O.P. in Budget Talks.”

Why write “Ask More of Millionaires”? Are these tax increases going to be voluntary?

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes and Binyamin Appelbaum reported Wednesday on Obama’s latest big-spending “stimulus” proposal, “Bigger Economic Role for Washington,” enthused that the chance of some of it coming law “could have a substantial effect on economic growth and unemployment....could add 100,000 to 150,000 jobs a month over the next year, according to estimates from several of the country’s best-known forecasting firms.”

Calmes had consistently hyped the administration’s stream of vague, liberal spend-now-pay-later economic “plans,”only to see the proposals die in Congress. This front-page headline from her July 20 story captures her typical cheerleading tone: “Bipartisan Plan For Budget Deal Buoys President – House Republicans Face Intensifying Pressure to Avoid Isolation.” (It has not aged well.)

Three liberal New York Times reporters teamed up Thursday morning to fact-check the Republican debate (and defend Obama) at the Reagan library.

John Broder, Nicholas Confessore, and Jackie Calmes cowrote “Attacking the Democrats, but Not Always Getting It Right,” which was not labeled or presented as "news analysis" (a label the Times is using less of lately) but as a factual news story. The text box read: “The candidates’ arguments run into factual hurdles.”

President Obama’s reaction to the latest lousy employment figures was framed by New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes on Saturday’s front page as “New Urgency in the Battle for Stimulus.” Calmes has long insisted Obama’s first multi-billion dollar economic “stimulus” was a success and did so again:

Nonpartisan analysts and the Congressional Budget Office have credited the first stimulus package with helping to end the recession and keep unemployment from growing even higher than it did. They say the winding down of the federal government’s help this year has contributed to the economy’s stall.

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes spent Labor Day with President Obama in Detroit, who spoke at a heavily union rally featuring speakers from organized labor. One of them, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, used just the sort of militant rhetoric against the Tea Party that would certainly have been condemned by the Times if coming from Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, or any other conservative politician or activist. Yet Hoffa was completely absent from Calmes’s Tuesday story, “For Obama, a Familiar Labor Day Theme.”

What Hoffa said: "President Obama this is your army!...Everybody here has got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong."

Today, the White House's Office of Management and Budget published its Mid-Session Review (large PDF), an economic forecast projecting, among other things, that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for calendar 2011 will be 1.7%. That doesn't sound like much (and it isn't), but to get there growth will have to almost triple its most recently reported level during the second half of the year. Second-half growth will also have to exceed the estimates of most economists.

Good luck finding any skepticism in the press over OMB's numbers. What follows is the numerical runthrough, followed by two media coverage examples.

"Speaker Says No, So Obama Delays Speech" is how The New York Times's September 1 front page headline spun the short squabble over the timing of President Obama's upcoming speech before Congress on his job creation plan. "Spat Over Which Day to Address Economy," added a subheadline.

The online version opted for a headline that went lighter on the loaded language: "Obama Moves Jobs Speech After Skirmish With Boehner."

For their part, Times writers Helene Cooper and Jackie Calmes ginned up the perpetual lament of partisan discord in Washington, before going on to portray President Obama as the bigger man for amending his initial wish to speak to Congress next Tuesday at 8 p.m. Eastern:

New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes, a consistent defender of Obama’s fiscal philosophy (and even the lack of one), announced on Thursday yet another “major address” by President Obama: “Obama to Press Committee on Jobs.”

President Obama will deliver a major address soon after Labor Day seeking to pressure a special Congressional committee to propose new measures to promote job creation as well as larger long-term deficit cuts than mandated, aides said Wednesday.

New York Times White House correspondent Jackie Calmes’s 1,300-word story for the Saturday Business section, with the online headline “G.O.P. on Defensive as Analysts Question Party’s Fiscal Policy,” was so blatantly biased it caught the attention of neo-liberal Mickey Kaus, who posted a withering, entertaining analysis at The Daily Caller, revisiting his old theme of liberal cocooning among the Times and its readership.

Kaus wrote that the emphasis on nonexistent “defensiveness” “must be heartening to Times readers. It’s also the stuff of which delusions are made – the familiar process of cocooning, in which Times-addicted Democrats wake up election day expecting President Kerry to have been swept into office only to discover that the paper of record has mistaken the views of its editorial board for the views of voters.” Kaus concluded “The NYT gets more like MSNBC every day.”

Wednesday’s New York Times lead story on the debt ceiling standoff by Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse,  “Facing Obstacles, G.O.P. Delays Vote On Plan For Debt – Conservatives Restive – Boehner’s Grip on His Caucus Is Put to the Test in Standoff,” is the second consecutive Times lead overloaded with “conservative” labels, as if only one side of the debate has an ideological motivation.

Yesterday’s tally in the lead story from Hulse and Jackie Calmes was 5-0, conservative-to-liberal labels. Today’s tally was 6-0, including the label in the headline. As that headline also indicates, the Times put the focus and the fault for the impasse squarely on the shoulders of Republican House Speaker Boehner, not President Obama.

House Republican leaders were forced on Tuesday night to delay a vote scheduled on their plan to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, as conservative lawmakers expressed skepticism and Congressional budget officials said the plan did not deliver the promised savings.

Continuing a New York Times trend of hyping Obama’s vague, politically motivated rhetorical feints as a genuine sign of budget-cutting commitment, Wednesday’s New York Times lead story by Jackie Calmes (pictured) and Jennifer Steinhauer overhyped the sudden re-emergence of a budget “plan” from the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators while providing President Obama a deck of headlines suitable for framing: “Bipartisan Plan For Budget Deal Buoys President – New Talks Are Sought – House Republicans Face Intensifying Pressure to Avoid Isolation.”

President Obama seized on the re-emergence of an ambitious bipartisan budget plan in the Senate on Tuesday to invigorate his push for a big debt-reduction deal, and he summoned Congressional leaders back to the bargaining table this week to “start talking turkey.”

Reporters have repeatedly portrayed Barack Obama as a deficit hawk committed to "slashing" spending, as MRC Research Director Rich Noyes documented in April ahead of the president's much-anticipated budget speech.

While the media touted Obama's budget blueprint, which contained puny cuts, as "deeply painful," CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told Congress the president's framework lacked sufficient detail to be scored as a credible plan.

Since then, Obama still hasn't revealed a serious plan to cut spending, yet correspondents continue to paint the president as a budget cutter.

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes’s lead story, “Behind Battle Over Debt, A War Over Government – Deal Elusive as 2 Parties Cling to Principles in Dispute Over Washington’s Role,” reels off a slanted history of recent Washington budget wars. Calmes baldly stated the G.O.P. isn’t serious about deficit reduction and treated Obama’s abrupt negotiating tactic on supposed deep spending cuts as equivalent to the G.O.P.’s long-standing, specific budget proposals

Calmes’s reporting is often weighted toward Democrats, and she has expressed her sympathies for Obama in his dealings with Republicans the last few years, complaining the G.O.P. had not sufficiently “accomodated” the president by passing Obama-care and financial regulation. She wrote for Friday’s lead:

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes’s latest front-page story on the budget battle displayed typical Times’s labeling bias, with “angry conservatives” but no liberals. Calmes also paid the Republican leadership a backhanded compliment for trying to stop their conservative base from provoking a financial crisis.

On Tuesday, Calmes claimed on the front page that Obama was “repositioning” himself as a centrist (after years of the Times insisting he already was one).

Tuesday’s off-lead New York Times story by Jackie Calmes from Washington claims Obama is now grasping centrism as a weapon in the budget battle. So why has the Times been telling us he has always been a centrist? “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner In Debt Impasse – Talks Remain Stalled – President Urges Biggest Deal Possible Despite G.O.P. Skepticism.”

For the last three years we’ve been told by the Times and the rest of the media Obama was in fact a “pragmatic” centrist, unlike the conservative George W. Bush. Why would Obama have to "reposition" himself to ground he already occupied?

President Obama made no apparent headway on Monday in his attempt to forge a crisis-averting budget deal, but he put on full display his effort to position himself as a pragmatic centrist willing to confront both parties and address intractable problems.

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes was with the president in El Paso, Texas, inspiring Latino voters for his 2012 reelection by pushing Congress to hack a "path to citizenship for illegal immigrants." It’s a long shot in a Republican-controlled Congress, on an issue Obama did not press when the Democrats had big majorities in the House and Senate, but those points were buried in her 1,100-word story Wednesday, "In Border City Talk, Obama Urges G.O.P. to Help Overhaul Immigration Law."

President Obama came to this border city on Tuesday to argue that he is doing his part to crack down on illegal immigration, and that Republicans must now join him in overhauling the nation’s immigration laws for the millions of workers already here illegally.

“I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry....These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts -- they’d barely make a dent -- will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.” – Food writer Mark Bittman in a March 30 op-ed, “Why We’re Fasting.”

“What causes the lack? Imprisonment, torture, being stranded on a desert island, anorexia, crop failure....and both a lack of aid and bad distribution of nutrients. Some (or much) of both of these last two stem from unregulated capitalism and greed.” – Bittman on his blog at nytimes.com, March 31.

In her Sunday off-lead New York Times story on bipartisan senators looking for budget compromise, “‘Gang of Six’ In the Senate Tackles Debt – A Bipartisan Effort to Build a Budget, Jackie Calmes furthered the Times’s long-standing legend about the “nasty” campaign ad by Republican Saxby Chambliss that helped him defeat Democratic Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia in 2002.

Once again, the Times falsely described a “nasty” anti-Cleland campaign ad by Chambliss, this time claiming it was “picturing Mr. Cleland with Osama bin Laden.” Has anyone at the Times ever actually watched the ad?

Days after President Obama called for forming a bipartisan group in Congress to begin negotiating a $4 trillion debt-reduction package, the parties have not even agreed to its membership. Yet six senators -- three Democrats, three Republicans -- say they are nearing consensus on just such a plan.

....

The group’s oldest members -- Senator Richard J. Durbin, 66, a progressive from Illinois who counts the Senate’s only socialist as a friend and ally, and Senator Saxby Chambliss, 67, a genial Georgia conservative whose nasty first campaign left lingering bad feelings among Democrats, and who is a confidant of Speaker John A. Boehner -- illustrate that even with the mounting federal debt intensifying the partisan divide over spending and taxes, the severity of the fiscal threat is forging unlikely alliances.

The ambitious, cost-trimming House Republican budget proposal put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan “is not going to become law anytime soon, if ever,” New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes assured us in her Wednesday “news analysis,” “A Conservative Vision, With Bipartisan Risks.” Yet it still “poses huge political risks for Republican candidates for Congress and for the White House in 2012.” A front-page, above-the-fold front-page photo teased the article, with the caption helpfully mentioning that Ryan’s budget “poses huge political risks for Republicans.”

Calmes, whose coverage is quite sympathetic to Obama’s fiscal priorities, especially his expensive “stimulus” package, immediately assured readers the conservative proposal didn’t have a snowball’s chance of becoming law:

The audacious long-term budget path that House Republicans outlined on Tuesday is not going to become law anytime soon, if ever. Senate Democrats and President Obama will see to that.

Even so, the plan rolled out by the Republican majority in the House figures to shake up this year’s already contentious budget debate as well as next year’s presidential politics. By its mix of deep cuts in taxes and domestic spending, and its shrinkage of the American safety net, the plan sets the conservative parameter of the debate over the nation’s budget priorities further to the right than at any time since the modern federal government began taking shape nearly eight decades ago.

Michael Powell’s New York Times story on the latest job figures made the lead slot in Saturday’s Times, with a headline portraying a revitalized Obama and a defensive G.O.P. “U.S. Posts A Gain Of 216,000 Jobs, A Lift For Obama -- Private Sector On Rise -- As Jobless Rate Falls to 8.8%, White House Warns G.O.P.”

One might not think an 8.8% unemployment rate would be cause for swagger and celebration, but you couldn't tell that from the Times's headline and lead.

The United States economy showed signs of kicking into gear in March, adding 216,000 jobs and prompting President Obama to proclaim a corner finally turned.

The president and his fellow Democrats pointed to the latest jobs report on Friday, and to an unemployment rate that fell a touch to 8.8 percent, as evidence that their policies, like stimulus spending and the payroll tax cut, were working. All of this, they made clear, could become ammunition in their showdown with House Republicans, who have spoken of cutting deeply into the federal budget and have threatened a government shutdown.

An emboldened Mr. Obama spoke of the political implications before several hundred workers at a United Parcel Service shipping center in Landover, Md.

Monday's New York Times “news analysis,” “President Underscores Similarities With Brazilians, but Sidesteps One,” found reporters Alexei Barrionuevo and Jackie Calmes with Obama in Rio de Janeiro highlighting the president’s positive reception in Brazil, inspiring the citizenry "because of his African heritage."

From a visit to this city’s most infamous slum to a national address amid the gilded elegance of a celebrated theater, President Obama on Sunday sought to underscore the shared histories and futures of the United States and Brazil, reaching out to the people of one of the most racially diverse countries in the Americas.

But Mr. Obama, on the second day of a five-day tour of Latin America, once again seemed to sidestep mentioning his own racial background in appearances here, even as Brazilians who gathered at a plaza trying to catch a glimpse of him said that he had inspired millions in this country because of his African heritage.