Major Newspapers

This category contains postings about the largest newspapers in America. For other papers, look under "Regional News" for each state.

WashPost's Ignatius Relies on Hillary Clinton Defender With Undisclosed Connections
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT

One of the odder pieces appearing during the past week in connection with the Hillary Clinton email and private server scandal was David Ignatius's attempt to deny that it's a scandal at all in Thursday's Washington Post.

Ignatius devoted four of his first five paragraphs to relaying the allegedly expert assessments of Jeffrey Smith, who Ignatius described as "a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information." Sounds like an arms-length guy, doesn't he? He's not. He has been a security adviser to Hillary Clinton's previous presidential campaign, defended John Kerry against criticism of the Massachusetts senator's national security negligence in 2004, and served on Bill Clinton's presidential transition team in late 1992 and early 1993.

NY Times Runs Interference As Hillary Bogusly Takes 'Responsibility'
By Tom Blumer | August 26, 2015 | 11:07 PM EDT

I'm sure we all feel better now that Hillary Clinton, as reported by the New York Times late Wednesday afternoon, "took responsibility" for "her decision to use only private email while she was secretary of state."

Well, no — and Times reporter Maggie Haberman should (and probably does) know why that doesn't cut it. Mrs. Clinton still maintained on Wednesday that investigations currently in process "will prove that I never sent, nor received, any email that was marked classified." Information already known shows that contention to be false, and the noise about "markings" is irrelevant in any event.

Press Determined Not to Blame Venezuela's Social and Economic Calamity on Its Chavista Government
By Tom Blumer | August 26, 2015 | 11:44 AM EDT

As Venezuela's Chavista economy under Nicolas Maduro continues to crumble, the Associated Press and others in the media to describe its problems as if they came out of nowhere instead of originating with its statist, oppressive government.

Examples follow the jump.

Apple Gets Kid-Glove Treatment After CEO Emails CNBC's Jim Cramer About Its China Business
By Tom Blumer | August 25, 2015 | 1:01 PM EDT

It doesn't seem likely that an oil company CEO would get the benefit of the doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook received from the press yesterday after he emailed well-known financial commentator and investment adviser Jim Cramer about his company's performance in China.

In an email read over the air on CNBC, Cook reported that "we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China through July and August." The question is whether, by providing this private disclosure, Cook violated U.S. "fair disclosure" regulations requiring that "materal information" be disclosed to the public.

Miami Herald Columnist: 'All Lives Matter' Preference of Vast Majority of Americans Is 'Moral Cowardice'
By Tom Blumer | August 24, 2015 | 11:38 PM EDT

Columnist Leonard Pitts may not have caught wind of Thursday's Rasmussen poll before he wrote the column published Saturday at the Miami Herald. Perhaps he still doesn't realize that Rasmussen reported that 64 percent of blacks and 78 percent of likely U.S. voters overall say that "All lives matter" is closer to their own views than "Black lives matter."

In his column, Pitts accused what turns out to be a vast majority of Americans of all races of "moral cowardice" for holding that view. In doing so, he gave the (white guy George Soros-funded, co-led by a guy who his family says he is white) "Black Lives Matter" movement an undeserved pass for the radical lunacy it promotes to this day, while he absurdly argued that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself would likely be behind that movement (bolds are mine throughout this post):

NY Times Finds Dem Who Thinks Hillary's Email Scandal is GOP's 'Swift Boat Issue of 2015'
By Tom Blumer | August 24, 2015 | 4:01 PM EDT

You can tell that the left is getting nervous about a scandal when they invoke the successful Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth campaign of 2004 against John Kerry.

As I noted on Saturday, Maria L. La Ganga at the Los Angeles Times did that as she described Planned Parenthood's attempts to fight back against the Center For Medical Progress's exposure of their baby body parts business. On Friday at the New York Times, in a story about how Hillary Clinton was "interrupting" her Martha's Vineyard vacation, Amy Chozick found a Clinton contributor who characterized her email and private server scandal as "somewhat of a tempest in a teapot," and also described it as "their (Republicans') Swift boat issue of 2015."

The Dean Pipedream: Hillary's Email and Server Scandal 'Manufactured' by a 'Bored' Press
By Tom Blumer | August 23, 2015 | 11:31 PM EDT

11-1/2 years ago, we had the "Dean Scream." After finishing a disappointing third in the Iowa caucuses, 2004 Democratic presidential candidate and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean attempted to further fire up his strangely giddy supporters by telling them about upcoming state primaries they would fight to win. After finishing his list, Dean told them: "And then we're going to Washington, DC to take back the White House!" — and shouted out the scream heard 'round the world which ended his electoral viability.

Sunday on Meet the Press, we saw the "Dean Pipedream." Asked by host Chuck Todd how well Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has handled the scandal over her use of a private server for personal and government emails while serving as Secretary of State, Dean blamed her situation "partly ... (on) a press that's bored." 

Barely News: Two-Thirds of Blacks Prefer 'All Lives Matter' Over 'Black Lives Matter'
By Tom Blumer | August 23, 2015 | 10:16 AM EDT

Most of us have heard it by now. If you have the audacity to point out in a conversation or speech that "All lives matter," you're a hateful, violent raging racist out to undermine the (white guy George Soros-funded) "Black Lives Matter" movement. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley have toth made the "mistake" of contending that "All lives matter" during the past few months. Each has felt it necessary to either apologize or otherwise back away from their statement.

A Thursday Rasmussen poll the vast majority of the establishment press has ignored and will likely to continue to ignore is telling us that the  (white guy George Soros-funded, co-led by a guy who his family says he is white) "Black Lives Matter" movement has a lot of work to do on what they would consider to be the home front.

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.

NYT Reporter: 'You Want Me to Indict and Damn Hillary Clinton? I'm Not Going to Do That'
By Mark Finkelstein | August 21, 2015 | 9:37 AM EDT

Finally! Something from a New York Times reporter you can absolutely, positively believe: that no matter the mounting evidence, he will not condemn Hillary Clinton for her email malfeasance.

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough repeatedly tried to get Jeremy Peters to state whether he agreed with the federal judge who yesterday declared that Hillary had not "followed government policy" regarding her email.  After haplessly trying to do anything but answer the question, an exasperated Peters finally sputtered: "you want, you want me to indict and damn Hillary?  I'm not going to do that."

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):