The partisan liberal news site Talking Points Memo managed to be tougher on President Obama's Thursday speech in Maryland than reporter Mark Landler of the New York Times, at least in his initial online filing on Thursday afternoon, "Obama Defends Energy Policy, Hitting Back at Presidential Candidates." TPM reporter Benjy Sarlin did the sort of aggressive fact-checking of Obama's claims that the Times reserves for Republican candidates and politicians.
Landler wrote for the Times:
New York Times reporter Mark Landler’s lead story for Saturday’s National section boosted Obama (and slapped down Mitt Romney) via the unlikely topic of the president's reading material: “Obama Buttresses Case for U.S. Resilience With Book From Unlikely Source.” Landler reveled in what he called a "delicious coincidence for the White House."
When Senator Barack Obama was photographed clutching a copy of “The Post-American World” as he left his campaign plane during the Democratic primaries in May 2008, some critics viewed it as a telling sign that he embraced a view of the United States as a waning world power.
New York Times reporter Mark Landler, with President Obama in Honolulu, filed “Obama Still Lets Surrogates Take the Lead as Gay Rights Momentum Builds” for Sunday’s paper.
Like his colleague Ashley Parker did in her own Sunday Times story, Landler celebrated Obama’s oratory, but right at the beginning of his story, on the president keeping his support for gay marriage at an official arms length. Landler also assumed opposition to gay marriage will be a political loser for whoever the Republican candidate may be.
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 correspondent Mark Landler followed President Obama out West on what certainly felt like a partisan campaign tour. Landler acknowledged Obama’s partisanship and “acidic words” for the G.O.P., but also protected the president’s right flank by characterizing his appeals for higher taxes and his class rhetoric as “populist,” not liberal, and by failing to correct the false impression Obama gave of shameful audience behavior at two Republican presidential debates.
Landler led off his Tuesday piece, “After Feisty Fund-Raising, a More Sociable Obama,” with a focus on the media’s new favorite rich guy, Doug Edwards.
President Obama met his dream date on Monday at a town hall meeting in Silicon Valley: a balding, soft-spoken former Google employee who said he was so rich he did not have to work anymore and begged Mr. Obama to raise his taxes.
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.
Chief New York Times “Caucus” blog writer Michael Shear hosted the latest edition of the paper’s “Caucus” podcast (there's no direct link) Friday, where he, political reporter Jeff Zeleny, and White House reporter Mark Landler agreed that Republican candidate Michele Bachmann was wrong to dismiss concerns about possible financial consequences resulting from a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
About four and a half minutes from the end, Landler took side in the budget-cutting battle, emphasizing how far Obama had come toward the Republican position with “very significant cuts,” and sympathized with the president’s “frustration” over the “unreasonable” “intransigence of the Republicans.”
President Obama’s budget blueprint may have been unanimously rejected by Congress in late May, but suddenly the president is the courageous, ambitious one on budget talks after issuing new rhetoric indicating a willingness to make cuts in social programs like Medicare.
In his Sunday front-page story, “House Speaker Is Pulling Back On Deficit Deal – $4 Trillion Plan Stalls Over Tax Increase,” congressional reporter Carl Hulse (pictured) continued to shade his own word choices in a pro-Democratic direction. Though the headline accurately stated that the stumbling block in negotiations are Democratic calls for a “tax increase,” Hulse reliably avoided the unpopular phrase in his report. The text box also underlined the idea of Obama the risk-taker: “An attempt at something big that some Republicans found too big.”
New York Times’s White House reporter Mark Landler provided puffball coverage of Vice President Joe Biden, who has evidently “overcome his reputation for gaffes” (says who?), in “Obama’s Growing Trust in Biden Is Reflected in His Call on Troops” Saturday. Landler emphasized the increasing confidence Biden is inspiring at the White House.
Obama’s "deliberate, almost scholarly" approach to foreign policy may be obtaining mixed results at best, but New York Times reporter Mark Landler trumpeted the White House line that the killing of Osama bin Laden would enable Obama to "reset" American policy in the Arab world: "Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World – Speech Likely to Put Bin Laden’s Death in Context of Uprisings." After years of falsely deriding President Bush as an incurious cowboy set on "going it alone" in foreign policy, the Times finds Obama's "immersion" in liberal journo-think (like Times columnist Tom Friedman) a welcome sign of "scholarly" pragmatism.
For President Obama, the killing of Osama bin Laden is more than a milestone in America’s decade-long battle against terrorism. It is a chance to recast his response to the upheaval in the Arab world after a frustrating stretch in which the stalemate in Libya, the murky power struggle in Yemen and the brutal crackdown in Syria have dimmed the glow of the Egyptian revolution.
Thursday’s New York Times led with Obama’s partisan budget speech, “Taking On G.O.P., Obama Unveils Debt Relief Plan – Calls for Spending Cuts and Tax Increases but Spares Medicare and Medicaid,” and once again did a double-standard dance around the politically inflammatory issue of changes in Medicare spending when proposed by a Democratic president.
While previous attempts at reform of Medicare by Republicans were eviscerated in the Times as “big Medicare cuts” or (just this week) a “shrinking” of the program, the paper greeted Obama’s own vague proposals with benign, soothing words like “overhaul” or claims that Obama was merely looking for Medicare “savings.” Thursday’s headline insisted Medicare and Medicaid would be “spared” and the text by reporters Mark Landler and Michael Shear described Obama as only proposing “changes to social welfare programs” and to “strictly limit the growth of Medicare and Medicaid.”
Bowing to reality, President Obama has officially reneged on a campaign promise to his base, reversing a previous decision on detainees at Guantanamo Bay that will keep the prison camp for terrorists open indefinitely. It made the front page of Tuesday’s Washington Post but was buried near the back of the New York Times that day, on page 19: “Obama, in Reversal, Clears Way for Guantanamo Trials to Resume.”
Reporters Scott Shane and Mark Landler rounded up some suspiciously sympathetic quotes from left-wing figures, or as the Times calls them, “civil rights advocates," either cutting Obama some slack or even finding bright spots in the decision.