Los Angeles Times

Defending Planned Parenthood, LA Times Relays 'Abortion Is 3 Pct. of Its Services' Myth
By Tom Blumer | August 22, 2015 | 11:44 PM EDT

Earlier today, I noted that Los Angeles Times reporter Maria L. La Ganga compared the heroic undercover work done by investigators at the Center for Medical Progress to the 2004 efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth. She meant it as a negative, claiming that the Swift Vets' assertions about Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's service in Vietnam and his antiwar activities after he returned home are "considered by many one of the ugliest, most unfair attacks in recent political memory." She even claimed — knowingly engaging in falsehood, in my opinion — that "the Swift boat claims were later discredited." Sorry, ma'am. The Swift Vets' truths stand tall to this today.

Though the Times Seattle bureau chief doesn't reference it in her writeup, an Associated Press chart contained therein relays a falsehood Planned Parenthood routinely promotes. This one claims that "Abortion is 3 percent of Planned Parenthood Services":

LA Times Reporter: CMP's Anti-Planned Parenthood Vids Are Like 'Discredited' Swiftvets 'Smear'
By Tom Blumer | August 22, 2015 | 1:11 PM EDT

Well, this was inevitable. On the same day that the Center for Medical Progress exposed the CEO of former Planned Parenthood partner StemExpress laughing "about shipping whole baby heads," a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, in what I have beeen told is a front-page story, has compared CMP's video campaign exposing the commerce in baby body parts to the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth's campaign. The Swift Boat Vets' effort successfully exposed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's serial lies about his service in Vietnam and his smearing of Vietnam veterans as war criminals after he returned.

Times reporter Maria L. La Ganga joined the paper in 1981, and "has served as San Francisco bureau chief, edited in the Business section and pitched in on five presidential elections." Even if one of those five elections wasn't 2004, and even if she didn't dig into conflicting claims over whether Kerry truly earned the Vietnam War medals he received, it's virtually inconceivable that she doesn't know about his frequently stated "Christmas in Cambodia" lie.

Crickets: Fed Official Finds No Evidence That $4.5 Trillion in QE Accomplished Anything
By Tom Blumer | August 20, 2015 | 10:26 AM EDT

Imagine if, in 1987, a Federal Reserve official could have pointed to a poorly performing economy and said, "Gee, this supply-side economics hasn't worked out very well." The press would surely have treated the story as a front-page item and ensured that it got air time on the Big Three networks' then-dominant nightly news broadcasts. Of course, there was no such credible report, because the economy under Ronald Reagan was so obviously robust.

Fast-forwarding 28 years, the author of a July Federal Reserve white paper on the Fed's Keynesian-based "quantitative easing" program contends that "There is no work, to my knowledge, that establishes a link from QE to the ultimate goals of the Fed—inflation and real economic activity." In other words, there is no evidence that $4.5 trillion in funny money with which the economy has been saddled has accomplished anything. In the establishment press, only CNBC's Jeff Cox has covered it (bolds are mine):

Not News: StemExpress's Thursday Courtroom Setback Against Center For Medical Progress
By Tom Blumer | August 14, 2015 | 11:50 PM EDT

As Spencer Raley at NewsBusters noted earlier this evening, StemExpress, "the now infamous biomedical company which allegedly bought fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood for profit, is breaking off its relationship with the nation’s leading abortion provider." Raley referenced a Politico item by Jennifer Haberkorn with a mid-afternoon Friday time stamp. As far as I can tell, it is the only establishment press outlet to note this development.

No establishment press outlet has noted a key courtroom development yesterday which may have been what really drove StemExpress to make its move — a move which, by the way, has not been announced in the "news" section at the company's web site, even though it has posted five other items during the past month relating to the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue outrages.

Cover-Up: Major Newspapers Keep Hillary's E-Mails Off the Front Page
By Scott Whitlock | August 12, 2015 | 4:14 PM EDT

Four of the country's largest papers kept the latest developments in Hillary Clinton's growing e-mail scandal off the front page on Wednesday. The revelation that the Democratic candidate had top secret information on her server was relegated to the bottom of page A13 in the New York Times. The Washington Post managed to place the additional news that Clinton will finally turn over her server on A2. The Los Angeles Times hid the story on A9. All, however, did better than USA Today, which skipped Clinton's scandal in the print edition. 

LA Times Fires Leftist Cartoonist Ted Rall For False Account About LAPD
By Matthew Balan | July 28, 2015 | 1:20 PM EDT

Breitbart's John Nolte reported on Tuesday that the LA Times discontinued its relationship with far-left cartoonist/writer Ted Rall, after he claimed in an May 2015 item that he was "thrown up against a wall, handcuffed and roughed up by an LAPD motorcycle policeman who also threw his driver's license into the sewer." The LAPD subsequently released records about the 2001 police encounter (where Rall was stopped for jaywalking), which included an audiotape that "does not back up Rall's assertions."

Press Mostly Fails to Report Union Exemptions in Some Minimum-Wage Laws
By Tom Blumer | July 27, 2015 | 11:52 PM EDT

I guess the slogan of labor has changed from "Look for the union label" to "Look for the union waiver."

The Los Angeles Times published a long front-page story early this morning on an issue some people thought disappeared after its initial exposure two months ago. The issue is whether union workers should be exempt from minimum wage laws, especially the sky-high minimums being enacted in some U.S. cities. To those who have been unaware of the issue up until now and are thinking that all of this must be a joke — it's not. It's just that the press, which not coincidentally has a higher percentage of union members than the private sector as a whole, has barely noted it.

CNN, Others Go Light on Hillary's 'Not Subpoenaed' Lie
By Tom Blumer | July 9, 2015 | 10:57 PM EDT

One would think that a presidential candidate falsely claiming that she never was subpoenaed would be bigger news story than people in the opposing party criticizing that candidate after the fact for her obviously false statement. As Tim Graham at NewsBusters noted late this afternoon, that's not the case. This post contains several more examples.

At CNN, the network's own Brianna Keilar, who conducted the interview during which Hillary Clinton denied ever receiving a congressional committee's subpoena for her work-related emails, "sharply criticized the Democratic presidential contender’s performance" for failing to answer several questions satisfactorily and for not even "engaging" when asked others. Despite Keilar's disappointment, beat reporters Jeff Zeleny and Tom LoBianco at CNN.com went light on Mrs. Clinton, and highlighted Republican critics.

Former Obama Official Asks: 'Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?'
By Tom Blumer | June 30, 2015 | 2:46 PM EDT

In a column at ForeignPolicy.com, a former Obama administration defense official who "served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011" has asked: "Can Gay Marriage Defeat the Islamic State?"

Rosa Brooks, who "is a law professor at Georgetown University," is serious. Her earnestness and deep ignorance are especially troubling, because it's clear that there are many people who "think" just like her who are still in the Obama administration and at the State Department (See: John Kerry's slow-motion sellout in Iranian negotiations).

Paper on ‘Changing Minds’ on Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Retracted (Part 2 of 2): Press Retraction Efforts Largely Unacceptable
By Tom Blumer | May 28, 2015 | 5:16 PM EDT

As noted in my previous related post, one of the authors of a late-2014 study which made the nonsensical claim that “a single conversation (can) change minds on divisive social issues, such as same-sex marriage,” causing "a cascade of opinion change," issued a retraction last week, because the data supporting it was faked. Since it was published in Science Magazine — and because it conveniently fit a leftism-advancing agenda — numerous press outlets ran stories on the study's results.

Now they're all having to run retractions and corrections. Besides the obvious problem that the lies have gotten a long head start, let's look at how the seven original publishers identified by Retraction Watch, as well as the Associated Press, have handled the matter. All too often the answer has been: "Not very well."

Widely-Covered Paper on ‘Changing Minds’ on Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Retracted (Part 1 of 2)
By Tom Blumer | May 28, 2015 | 2:37 PM EDT

"Science" has a problem — or more accurately stated, those who produce and publish "scienitific" studies — have a problem. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the leading weekly peer-reviewed general medical journals, caused quite a stir last week when he said that "much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue." That may be an underestimate.

One of the more recent such examples involves a paper published late last year in Science Magazine, which calls itself “The World’s Leading Journal of Scientific Research, Global News and Commentary."

LA Unions Lobby for Exemption From $15/Hr. Minimum Wage Law They Pushed
By Tom Blumer | May 27, 2015 | 11:07 PM EDT

This has to be the month's top entry in the "Just when you think you've seen it all" category — and it will be more than a little interesting to see how the nation's press handles it.

As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the City Council in Los Angeles, by a vote of 14-1, ordered the drafting of a law mandating a citywide minimum wage of $15 per hour by 2020, noting that "the support of Mayor Eric Garcetti virtually guarantee its eventual adoption." Now that it's almost a done deal, labor unions whose members earn less want to be exempt from the law. Seriously. And it's not that the unions were caught off guard, because the person who is most visibly arguing for the exemption "helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition"! Apparently caught completely flat-footed, three Los Angeles Times reporters, in a rare break from the paper's non-stop leftist bias, filed a fair and balanced report on the truly offensive situation.