As the Obama staff labors to deny they’re waging what’s being called “Obama’s war on journalism,” it might not help to have journalists mocked as fussy “figure skating judges.”
In today’s Washington Post that’s what we read from David Plouffe as he defended the White House from the “minutiae” that the White House counsel urgently wanted to keep Obama clueless about a Treasury Department inspector general’s report on the IRS scandal:
Juliet Eilperin
By Tim Graham | May 23, 2013 | 3:38 PM EDT
By Tim Graham | May 2, 2013 | 11:39 PM EDT
Last Friday, Obama made “history” by being the first president to address Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest purveyor of abortions. Obama did this in spite of the terrible timing, during the Kermit Gosnell trial. But like the Gosnell trial, Obama’s speech drew a blackout: no story on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, or NPR.
MSNBC's Chris Hayes hailed it was a "history-making" speech, but complained that Obama never used the A-word, which he should never feel ashamed to use. Rachel Maddow praised Obama for “putting a new capstone” on bold proclamations for the “right to choose.” USA Today and the Los Angeles Times somehow missed it. The New York Times blogged it – with this amazing paragraph from reporter Peter Baker as he mentioned Gosnell:
White House Easter Egg Roll May Be Cancelled Due to 'Funding Uncertainty'; a Partisan Matter at WaPo Only After Gingrich Objects
By Tom Blumer | March 19, 2013 | 10:01 AM EDT At the Washington Post's Post Politics blog on Monday, Juliet Eilperin revealed that the White House has notified participants invited to the April 1 Easter Egg Roll that the event "is subject to cancellation due to funding uncertainty surrounding the Executive Office of the President and other federal agencies."
Eilperin only considered the White House's latest obvious example of "no petty and partisan gesture left behind" a partisan matter when a Republican who hasn't held political office for 15 years objected (bolds are mine):
WaPo Hails New Trucking Regs, Insists Industry & Enviros Both Happy, Leaves Out Criticism from Independent Truckers Group
By Ken Shepherd | August 10, 2011 | 4:45 PM EDT Washington Post staffer Juliet Eilperin portrayed proposed new federal regulations on heavy-duty trucks and buses as having hearty agreement by both environmentalists and trucking industry lobbyists.
Unfortunately Eilperin left out the dissenting remarks of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA), which blasted the rule change as harmful to the small-business truckers it represents.
From an August 9 OOIDA press release:
By Ken Shepherd | December 2, 2010 | 3:55 PM EST
During a congressional hearing in March 2009, manmade global warming skeptic Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) referred to God's promise in the the book of Genesis to never again flood the entire Earth as one reason why he is dismissive of global warming alarmists.
"The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood," Shimkus insisted, after quoting from Genesis 8:22.
Ever since then, the media have gone back from time to time to scoff at Shimkus's statement, citing his religious beliefs as reason he should not considered credible when it comes to challenging climate change science.
But if the media think that's fair game, shouldn't they apply the same standard to religious language employed by climate change alarmists like Christiana Figueres?
By Tim Graham | October 15, 2010 | 4:38 PM EDT
It’s not every day that a front-page Washington Post report has copy that can be mocked as “Auditioning to Be the Next Obama Girl.” (That is, unless you count Eli “Obama's Chiseled Pectorals” Saslow.) James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal designated this florid passage for that title, from a sprawling 5,355-word Wednesday front-page article by reporters Michael Leahy and Juliet Eilperin.
The moment was vintage Obama -- emphasizing his zest for inquiry, his personal involvement, his willingness to make the tough call, his search for middle ground. If an Obama brand exists, it is his image as a probing, cerebral president conducting an exhaustive analysis of the issues so that the best ideas can emerge, and triumph.
Slogging through the entire article (eating up all of two inside pages) demonstrates that the Post reporters were praising Obama’s “zest” and thoughtfulness even as they summarized how Obama, in their view, struck too “centrist” a path by supporting offshore drilling and stiff-arming the Left – which Leahy and Eilperin never identify as liberals, merely as “environmental activists.” The Post reporters say Team Obama was trying to find a “grand bargain” to pass a “climate-change bill.”
By Tim Graham | July 12, 2010 | 8:25 AM EDT
The Washington Post put the bad news for liberals right at the top of Monday's front page, left side: "Climate debate unmoved by spill." Reporters David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin lamented that "great change" is not following the "great tragedy" of the BP oil spill. We haven't had an "awakening" to our wasteful ways:
Environmentalists say they're trying to turn public outrage over oil-smeared pelicans into action against more abstract things, such as oil dependence and climate change. But historians say they're facing a political moment deadened by a bad economy, suspicious politics and lingering doubts after a scandal over climate scientists' e-mails.
The difference between now and the awakenings that followed past disasters is as stark as "on versus off," said Anthony Leiserowitz, a researcher at Yale University who tracks public opinion on climate change.
Only liberals are "awake," while the public is "asleep." They wonder why newspaper readership is declining. Here's how the story started:
By Ken Shepherd | April 29, 2010 | 11:39 AM EDT
It's no secret that the late Sen. Ted Kennedy was a major obstacle to a proposed wind farm in Nantucket Sound, but Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin at least buried that fact in today's 18-paragraph page A6 story on the Obama administration approving the first offshore wind farm in the United States.
In the lead paragraph, Eilperin hailed the announcement by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as "a move that could pave the way for significant offshore wind development elsewhere in the nation."
Yet Eilperin waited until the 14th paragraph to note that the project, "split the Democratic Party" when it was proposed in 2001 because Kennedy, "whose family compound overlooks the sound, fought it, with criticism of its aesthetics and its effects on fishing and boating."
Of course Eilperin devoted a significant part of her article to relaying the objections of other opponents of the Cape Wind project, liberal activists who tossed out the predictable boilerplate liberal invective against Big Business...:
By Tim Graham | April 22, 2010 | 8:37 AM EDT
In its puffy celebration of Earth Day on Thursday, The Washington Post found the green movement in "midlife crisis." Sadly, reported David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin, the American people aren't grasping the immediacy of global warming, or seeing their exhalations as pollution:
The problems are more slippery: pollutants like greenhouse-gas emissions, which don't stink or sting the eyes. And current activists, by their own admission, rarely muster the kind of collar-grabbing immediacy that the first Earth Day gave to environmental causes.
"I don't think we've come up with a good way in the conservation movement of making it real for people," said Arturo Sandoval, who was 22 when he organized activities across the West on the first Earth Day.
By Tim Graham | February 15, 2010 | 2:38 PM EST
On the top left of Monday’s Washington Post came an eye-opening report acknowledging the continuing series of scientific problems from the United Nations in its dire forecasts about the impending doom of global warming. The headline was "Missteps weigh on agenda for climate."
Reporters Juliet Eilperin and David Fahrenthold suggested a "scientific consensus" remains about drastic human-caused global warming, but sloppy work and overstatement can "give doubters an opening." (It sounds a little like the way reporters started blaming Bill Clinton for feeding the haters.) The story began:
With its 2007 report declaring that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize -- and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming.
But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel's work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel's methods and mistakes -- including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level -- give doubters an opening.
By Tim Graham | January 3, 2010 | 7:02 PM EST
The front page of Saturday’s Washington Post heralded the first wave of a new evangelism in the United States. It’s not for a religion, per se, but they are definitely disciples of a lifestyle (and a government-style).
By Tim Graham | December 5, 2009 | 9:23 AM EST
The Washington Post put ClimateGate on the front page, top left in Saturday’s edition. It’s also the top story at washingtonpost.com. The headline is "In e-mails, science of warming is hot debate." The website summary: "E-mails stolen from British research center show climate-change leaders noting flaws in their own data and seemingly scheming to muzzle critics."Wow. The story is breaking. Here’s paragraph two of the David Fahrenthold and Juliet Eilperin story: