Paul Farhi

Journalists Dissatisfied with Holder's Vague Assurances on Prosecuting Reporters
By Ken Shepherd | May 28, 2014 | 12:55 PM EDT

A group of prominent journalists -- including former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie -- met yesterday with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder but walked away from the meeting disappointed that the Obama administration's top cop won't amend vague Justice Department guidelines which, they argue, make it far too easy for the administration to hound a reporter with the threat of criminal prosecution for protecting his or her sources in a leak investigation.

Yet in covering the story, Post editors shoved Paul Farhi's reporting on the matter to the front page of Style, rather than the A-section, and slapped on a yawn-inducing headline guaranteed to entice only the wonkiest of readers: "Media group, Holder meet on leak cases." "U.S. rules on warrants and subpoenas targeting reporters are challenged," noted the subheader. According to Farhi, the group of journalists want to see DOJ policy amended so that the attorney general must personally get involved in a subpoena request for a journalist's records (emphasis mine):

NPR Picks New CEO From L.A. Who Bankrolls DNC, ACLU, and Barack Obama
By Tim Graham | May 10, 2014 | 9:49 AM EDT

NPR named a new CEO on Friday. His name is Jarl Mohn (pronounced “Yarl Moan”), who was a founder of the cable channel E and an executive at MTV and VH-1.

Leftists might worry with these corporate connections, but Mohn has been a major donor to Pasadena NPR station KPCC – as well as a major donor to Barack Obama and the DNC. For 15 years, from 1994 to 2009, he chaired the board of the ACLU of Southern California. His Mohn Family Foundation has continued to support the group.

NBC News President Slams Media Coverage of David Gregory as 'Vindictive,' 'Untrue'
By Randy Hall | April 24, 2014 | 8:13 PM EDT

Meet the Press host David Gregory has been the focus of turmoil since the Sunday morning NBC program suffered its lowest ratings since 1992 during the past year and was the subject of a meeting with network news president Deborah Turness in March. After that gathering, NBC “doubled down” on Gregory as host of the series, along with giving him additional duties on the network's news website.

However, an article written by Paul Farhi in Sunday's edition of the Washington Post stated that during the first three months of 2012, the NBC program finished a distant third, far behind CBS's Face the Nation and This Week With George Stephanopoulos on ABC. Just four days later, Turness sent a memo to the show's staff declaring that coverage of Gregory's troubles has been “vindictive, personal and above all -- untrue.”

NBC Tried 'Unusual' Psychological Assessment to Figure Out David Gregory and His Flagging 'Meet The Press' Ratings
By Tim Graham | April 21, 2014 | 8:36 AM EDT

Washington Post media reporter Paul Farhi wrote a big Style section front-pager for Monday on how NBC's Meet the Press, "Sunday's most venerable news show has stumbled in the ratings."

The shocking paragraph that will get discussed around Washington today is that NBC commissioned a psychological consultant to figure how who MTP host David Gregory is, and what makes him tick. Or maybe, why people just don't like him very much:

On His New HBO Show, John Oliver Will Relentlessly Mock Republicans...Just Like 'The Daily Show'
By Tim Graham | April 3, 2014 | 11:00 PM EDT

Thursday’s Washington Post promoted the forthcoming HBO news-satire show starring “The Daily Show” correspondent John Oliver, run by a former head writer for “The Daily Show.” But reporter Paul Farhi passes along claims that it won’t be like “The Daily Show.” Right. By story's end, it's clear he doesn't believe that, either.

But in classic Comedy Central fashion Oliver’s team previewed their tilt by releasing two YouTube videos mocking the Republican National Committee’s “latest outreach ad to young voters.” It suggests that young Republicans wear stupid clothes (too-small leather jackets), ride tricycles,  and engage in “non-vaginal intercourse with girls they met at Christian summer camp" (video below):

Classy! Former NY Times Editor Bill Keller Lectures Cancer Patient She Should Be 'Going Gently' Like They Do In Britain
By Tim Graham | January 14, 2014 | 8:26 AM EST

Just how big a jerk is former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller? Enough of a jerk that he’d write a column scolding a cancer patient that his father-in-law had more class when he died with dignity in Britain, as opposed to her fighting away, in real life and on Twitter, with “the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.”

He pulled himself into this unseemly fight after his wife Emma Gilbey Keller attacked cancer patient Lisa Bonchek Adams in a column in the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian.

WashPost Columnist Richard Cohen's Amazing Boomerang of an Attack on 'Racist' Republicans
By Tim Graham | November 13, 2013 | 10:31 AM EST

The Washington Post isn’t usually quick to publicize controversies about its own employees. But there’s an exception: when a Postie trips the left-wing race-gender-LGBT hate-thought alert. In that case, it didn’t take 24 hours for media reporter Paul Farhi to get the assignment on the "baying for Cohen's head."

Liberals were furious with Post columnist Richard Cohen for allegedly insulting the biracial family of new ultraliberal New York mayor Bill De Blasio. The amusing part is that Cohen was attempting to trash conservatives as the backward ones:

Bozell Column: Spreading 'Scandal-Free Administration' Ignorance
By Brent Bozell | November 5, 2013 | 10:58 PM EST

The latest and greatest Obama scandal is the disastrous Obamacare rollout, but it has something in common with all the others (besides Obama knew nothing). Some journalists are still brazenly trying to deny against all evidence that this scandal has any substance at all.

The same people who freaked out over President Bush's one sentence in one State of the Union speech that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa are now making excuses for Obama saying everywhere, endlessly, "If you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you." To them, that's not lying -- blatantly, repeatedly, shamelessly. He simply "misspoke," claimed the New York Times editorial page.

Hypocrisy Alert: WashPost Puts Race-related Lawsuits on Page One -- Unless It's a Lawsuit Against The Post
By Tim Graham | October 13, 2013 | 7:02 PM EDT

Media outlets see themselves as brave souls reporting on racial discrimination inside greedy corporations. On June 12, The Washington Post made a front-page story out of a suit against BMW and Dollar General by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for “indirectly discriminating against African Americans by using criminal background checks to screen out workers.”

At FrontPage magazine, conservative freelancer Evan Gahr reports the Post is “quieter than deaf mutes about a lawsuit alleging race discrimination at their own paper.” This is just like NPR's on-air silence when it was sued by correspondent Sunni Khalid for racial and anti-Muslim discrimination in 1997.  The blog Fishbowl DC covered the contrast, and then said that contrast is interesting, but tried to underline just how totally understandable the Post blackout on itself was:

Puh-leeze: Jay Carney Claims 'Joe Klein Said He Thought I Was a Republican' When He Joined Obama-Biden
By Tim Graham | September 26, 2013 | 8:36 AM EDT

Washington Post reporters Paul Farhi and Billy Kenber caused a morning cereal spew inside the Beltway. In a story about the revolving door between reporters and Team Obama, there was this unintentional laugh line from Jay Carney: “But I think any reading of my coverage as a reporter would show that I was not an ideologue. [Time columnist] Joe Klein said he thought I was a Republican” when Carney joined Biden’s staff.

See my dossier on how Carney found Hillary was “strangely mesmerizing" as “the polite but passionate American citizen,” or how Bill Clinton was “probably the best white politician out there speaking on race issues.” (That sounds exactly like Joe Klein.) The Posties quoted Rush Limbaugh decrying the obvious media-Obama mindmeld, then lamely tried to argue their way out of that reality:

CNN Discusses Alec Baldwin Getting MSNBC Show Without Mentioning Recent Homophobic Rant
By Noel Sheppard | August 11, 2013 | 5:52 PM EDT

CNN's Reliable Sources on Sunday discussed Alec Baldwin supposedly getting his own show on MSNBC.

For some reason, guest host Brian Stelter of the New York Times as well as his panelists chose not to mention Baldwin's recent homophobic rant despite it occurring just six weeks ago (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bozell Column: Can Bezos Save The Washington Post?
By Brent Bozell | August 10, 2013 | 8:11 AM EDT

The Washington Post is a legend in the minds of the Washington elite, so its financial decline has caused quiet panic. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik put it, “You think of stories like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, these are all stories where The Washington Post led the nation's understanding, the world's understanding of some major issues.”

Outside the liberal media, you wonder how long Post fans can wallow in their Nixon-crumbling polyester “glory days” in the early 1970s. But nostalgia ruled as the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com. “Now he is being credited as a white knight with deep pockets helping to save one of this country's great newspapers,” oozed NBC reporter Tom Costello.