President Obama spoke off the record to news columnists, in a defensive response to Republican criticism that he has seemed passive and uninterested in the face of Islamic terror attacks against the United States. In a news story about the meeting New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris revealed this damning admission from the president: "In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments." So why was that sentence was deleted from the version that appeared in Friday’s print edition?
Peter Baker
By Tom Blumer | November 16, 2015 | 4:22 PM EST
The obvious pull quote of the day from President Obama's contentious press conference in Antalya, Turkey is this statement: "What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with ..." Obama then claimed that any ideas coming from those who believe in such a notion have "no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and to protect the people in the region."
Ed Driscoll at PJ Media believes that these words are "the president’s equivalent of Carter’s malaise speech" in the 1970s. Just in case he's right, related stories at the Associated Press and the New York Times have not mentioned Obama's statement, a clear indicator of his lack of genuine resolve, in their coverage.
By Matthew Balan | August 24, 2015 | 2:28 PM EDT
ABC, CBS, and CNN's Sunday morning news shows all ignored the ongoing controversy over Planned Parenthood's harvesting of aborted babies' organs, as exposed in a series of recent undercover videos by the Center for Medical Progress. George Stephanopoulos featured Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley on ABC's This Week, but failed to ask him a question about the scandal. NBC's Meet the Press did include a clip of Chuck Todd asking Republican Senator Joni Ernst about federal funding of the abortion giant. However, Todd didn't bring up the issue with California Governor Jerry Brown.
By Clay Waters | March 28, 2015 | 7:29 PM EDT
Did you know that Republicans are in "unquestioned" "lockstep" support for Israel? That's how some New York Times headline writers saw it in an analysis by reporter Peter Baker, "For Republican Candidates, Support for Israel Is an Inviolable Litmus Test."
The initial online headline portrayed the GOP as mindless slavish drones for Israel: "Republicans, in Shift, Demand Lockstep Support for Israel." The extremely unflattering language crept into the story's text box: "Anything but unquestioned backing of the Jewish state can mean trouble."
By Tim Graham | March 8, 2015 | 1:54 PM EDT
Ben Smith of the Daily Signal tweeted out a shocking visual: the New York Times front page on Sunday cropped George W. and Laura Bush out of its photo of a Selma anniversary march. They cropped it just to include President Obama. (Notice the Bushes didn't try to crowd right next to the president to get into the frame.)
New York Times Approves of Obama's Cuban 'Audacity' vs. 'Dinosaur,' 'Hard-Line' Conservative Opponents
By Clay Waters | December 19, 2014 | 3:20 AM EST Surprising news that President Obama would normalize relations with Cuba by establishing full diplomatic relations while easing restrictions excited reporters and editorial writers at the New York Times, who saw the demise of the "dinosaurs" and "aging...hard-liners" who opposed liberalizing ties to the authoritarian Cuban government.
By Clay Waters | November 2, 2014 | 7:48 PM EST
The New York Times saw grim tidings for Democrats in the congressional elections, but over the weekend, one could spot the paper subtly separating President Barack Obama from the travails of his party. And one headline should make the Hall of Fame for wishful thinking on the part of the liberal media.
NYT's Front Page Gushes on Eric Holder, 'Leaning Forward' on Race in Ferguson Case; Hits Too-Cool Obama From Left
By Clay Waters | August 20, 2014 | 10:01 PM EDT More pampering of Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder on the front page of the New York Times: Wednesday's edition featured "Shared Vision, Varying Styles," yet another defense of Holder (and criticism of Obama from the left) in a "news analysis" in the paper's off-lead slot by White House reporter Peter Baker, with Matt Apuzzo.
Strangely for a story on racial matters under Obama, the story made no mention of Obama's infamous judgment that Boston police had "acted stupidly" after a racially fraught incident in July 2009 involving the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. Also nothing about Holder playing the race card by blaming opposition to the administration's policies on "racial animus."
By Tom Blumer | January 10, 2014 | 6:51 PM EST
A frontrunner for the award going to the most obvious media double standard of the week certainly has to be NBC reporter and Meet the Press host David Gregory.
Asking a question virtually no one in the press has asked about President Barack Obama in matters far weightier than Chris Christie's "Bridgegate," Gregory addressed the following tweet to New York Times White House Correspondent Peter Baker (HT Twitchy):
By Tim Graham | December 26, 2013 | 4:32 PM EST
A month back, I noticed the usual back-scratching that goes on when The Washington Post makes a list of the year’s best books, and two of the top five nonfiction books of the year were former Posties.
When the New York Times list came out in mid-December, a similar thing happened: one of their Ten Best Books came from Times reporter Peter Baker, "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in The White House."
By Ken Shepherd | December 18, 2013 | 1:30 PM EST
"Top journalists from The New York Times, NBC News and CNN acknowledged Wednesday that, generally speaking, the national media has a liberal bias," Politico's media reporter Dylan Byers noted in a December 18 post recapping a Politico Playbook breakfast discussion held earlier on Wednesday morning.
More than one panelist opined that it's not just that journalists tend to be liberal on policy questions but that they live and work in environments which are socially liberal. "I live in northwest Washington, none of my neighbors are evangelical Christians [and] I don't know a lot of people in my kid's preschool who are pro-life," New York Times writer Mark Leibovich noted. Fellow Washington, D.C.-based journalist Jake Tapper picked up on that thread:
By Tim Graham | December 5, 2013 | 11:23 PM EST
The New York Times could only devote 53 words in the Business section on Thursday to Martin Bashir resigning from MSNBC, but swooned over Barack Obama’s latest list of book purchases in a story headlined “In Obama’s Book List, Glimpses of His Journey.”
Reporter Peter Baker explained “A reading list offers a rare window into the presidential mind, a peek at what a commander in chief may be thinking about beyond the prosaic and repetitive briefings that dominate his days.” But Obama stands out for his literary taste and his spending part of his childhood abroad: