When a news story is too newsworthy to ignore but too embarrassing to the Obama administration to highlight, what's a liberal newspaper editor to do? Why, bury it, of course. That's what Washington Post editors did to Steven Mufson's February 14 story on an inspector general's report finding, surprise, surprise, that taxpayer monies on another Obama-hyped green energy project have gone to waste.
What's more, the Post's editor's assigned the item a boring headline, "Report: Grant to battery company was mismanaged."
Mufson noted how $150 million dollars of stimulus money went to LG Chem Michigan, which manufactures cells for batteries. Last Wednesday, a report from the Energy Department Inspector General, George H. Friedman, said the company “had not been managed effectively.”
Less than half of the promised 440 jobs had been created, and only three of the five production lines were operational. It also found that the workers watched movies, played games, and were generally idle. Furthermore, the cost/labor overruns were attributed to LG Chem paying their workers for “doing community activities.”
LG said they weren’t going to fire people after they had paid to train them, but the inspector general’s report said those costs should’ve been billed to the company, not to the American taxpayer.
Not only did the Post bury this article in the "economy and business" page -- even though this is fundamentally about the failure of an Obama administration push for green energy -- Mufson himself arranged his article so as to delay getting around to the Obama angle. President Obama's participation in the July 2010 groundbreaking was noted in paragraph six, while Mufson waited to paragraph nine to note where the IG's report chastised the Energy Department.
This isn't the first time media outlets have buried failed Obama economic policies when it comes to green energy. During the Solyndra fiasco, when the company fell into bankruptcy, despite a $500 million dollar loan from the government, new outlets, like NBC and MSNBC, completley ignored it. CBS didn't report on it for most of the summer. Then agan, we're talking about Barack Obama – let's give him a pass. It's the new credo for some in the media.
