The lengths MSNBC will go to deflect blame from President Obama for anything bad that can be tied to his administration is simply amazing.
On Friday, a liberal green jobs activist was brought on "MSNBC Live" to falsely accuse former President George W. Bush of making that ill-advised loan to failed solar company Solyndra (video follows with transcript and commentary):
ABC and CBS on Friday skipped any coverage of a congressional investigation into Solyndra and the appearance of its two top executives to plead the Fifth. Only NBC's Today show provided an in-depth look at the now bankrupt green company and the loans given to it by the Obama administration.
Today reporter Lisa Myers noted that taxpayers stand to lose up to half a billion dollars. She explained, "So, images of its executives taking the Fifth today are not the optics the White House had hoped for." Good Morning America and Early Show kept Americans from seeing those optics by not covering them. They did, however have time for a number of frivolous stories.
What a curiously incurious Morning Joe bunch! Joe Scarborough says Solyndra "is just not a story I have focused on" and John Heilemann similarly admits to not having "drilled down" on the matter. Meanwhile, Harold Ford, Jr. assures us that when it comes to any potential Solyndra scandal, "there's no there, there" and that no one "has done anything illicit here at all."
A blasé Joe Scarborough grudgingly introduced "this Solyndra thing," citing those pesky "conservatives on Twitter" who keep raising it. The show deigned to devote under two minutes to the story, with nary a mention of the facts that the main driver behind Solyndra was a major Obama fundraiser, that the Bush admin blew off funding for Solyndra after concluding their products weren't competitive and that Solyndra execs are now taking the Fifth. View the video after the jump.
Let's note the likely reason why what Julia Seymour observed earlier today is the case -- namely, that network news reports have taken to calling the Solyndra situation an "embarrassment."
The use of that term probably dates back to September 16, which is as far as I can tell the first time the Associated Press filed a beyond-perfunctory report about now-bankrupt Solyndra, the beneficiary of over $500 million in Energy Department loan guarantees. In January, the government also gave Solyndra's principal investors preferential treatment in advance of what was a clearly inevitable bankruptcy. Tuesday evening, the AP's Matthew Daly went to the E-word again in the final paragraph of the excerpt which follows:
Part 1 on the Associated Press's September 16 evening story ("Obama admin reworked Solyndra loan to favor donor"; saved here at my web host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) by Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum criticized the reporters and the wire service for making it appear as if all the findings in the story were the result of original work.
Two other paragraphs in the report in my opinion represent a blatant but clumsy attempt to give the impression that the bankruptcy of a major beneficiary of Department of Energy stimulus-driven loans was a bipartisan fiasco:
The public learned on September 3 from William McQuillen at Bloomberg (possibly earlier elsewhere) that now-bankrupt Soyndra's private investors restructured the company's finances in January by lending the company "$75 million." As a condition of doing so, they convinced the government to give the new loan senior status over all other creditors. Now taxpayers face a likely loss of hundreds of millions in Department of Energy loans, perhaps over $500 million.
On September 7, Peg Brickley at the Wall Street Journal clarified that the amount involved was $69 million, and identified the names of the lending entities involved (HT to American Thinker for both stories).
But if you haven't stayed with or are unfamiliar with the story and read the Associated Press report this evening by Matthew Daly and Jack Gillum, you would think that the wire service did all of the dirty work to learn these things (credit-hogging language in bold):
MSNBC ranter extraordinaire Dylan Ratigan is no fan of "crony capitalism" -- when businessmen get government to help them socialize the risk of their ventures through government subsidies or bailouts, leaving taxpayers on the hook for failure while reaping the benefits of government largesse.
The Obama administration's handling of solar energy firm Solyndra is a perfect example of same.
Yet this week, Ratigan's been strangely silent on the Solyndra congressional investigation this week, even as it's been covered in major newspaper outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post.
Ratigan likes to present himself as one who marches to the beat of his own drum, but on this matter, he seems to be following the silence of the rest of the MSNBC choir.
As the scandal involving failed solar panel company Solyndra and President Obama grows, the prime time programs at the so-called "news network" known as MSNBC continue to ignore it.
Despite the announcement of the Solyndra bankruptcy on August 31, "Hardball," "PoliticsNation," "The Last Word," "The Rachel Maddow Show," and "The Ed Show" have not done one single report on the subject.
On Tuesday and Wednesday's World News, reporter Brian Ross exposed e-mails indicating that the Obama administration gave a $535 million loan to the green company Solyndra, despite deep misgivings inside the government about its viability. Yet, Good Morning America has declined to follow-up on the ABC scoop.
GMA completely ignored the story, failing to even mention it in a news brief. The morning show did, however, find time to devote over five minutes to the divorce of reality TV star Michaele Salahi. While his own network minimized the new developments, Ross was able to explain the details on Wednesday's O'Reilly Factor.
Two weeks ago (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), yours truly pointed out how establishment press coverage of the bankruptcy of Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar had emphasized its Bay State assistance, and only rarely brought up how it benefitted by being able to sell solar panels it otherwise would probably not have bothered to produce to projects benefitting from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ("stimulus") dollars.
On August 17, Larry Dignan of ZDNet, in an item published at CBSnews.com, tried to convince readers that Evergreen's failure was not indicative of an industry meltdown (bolds are mine):