Ken Thomas

AP Avoids Reporting Obama's Callous 'We Have Contained ISIS' Statement
By Tom Blumer | November 15, 2015 | 11:44 AM EST

As of early this morning, Matt Drudge was carrying a link to a story headlining how President Obama is "under fire for saying ISIS 'contained' just hours before Paris attack."

Well, Obama is under some fire, but Drudge's link is to coverage at the UK Daily Mail. That's unfortunately unsurprising, because there is little to no mention of Obama's naive, foolish and callous statement in the U.S. establishment press. So Obama may be "under fire" from people who are paying attention, but low-information news consumers (and voters) who didn't happen to see the original Thursday interview will likely remain unaware of it. In one such example of convenient oversight, the Associated Press published a Thursday evening story on that interview, and decided that its only newsworthy element was Obama's immigration-related criticism of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Press Definition of 'Joke': Any Statement That Insults or Threatens a Republican or Conservative
By Tom Blumer | November 11, 2015 | 11:39 PM EST

Just as a reality check, I asked a friend today what his reaction would be if I said with a sincere-sounding voice that he makes me want to strangle him. He said, "Almost sounds like a threat." I said, "No, it was supposed to be a joke." He said, "No it's not."

I also asked another person what her reaction would be if I earnestly called her "demented." She said, "You'd be insulting me." I asked, "What if I said I was just joking?" Response: "I'd say, 'The heck you were.'" In the past ten days, members of the press have decided that threatening language and an insult, both directed at GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, were only "jokes." There is virtually no chance that these same people would give the same treatment to threats and insults directed at Democrats and leftists.

NPR: Hillary Timed Keystone Announcement to Pope's Visit
By Tom Blumer | September 23, 2015 | 10:46 PM EDT

It would appear that Hillary Clinton's act is wearing thin even among the people at that liberal bastion known as NPR.

Tuesday afternoon, the headline at an NPR story about Mrs. Clinton's sudden decision to publicly announce her opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline project indicated that her announcement was deliberately timed to coincide with Pope Francis's visit to the United States (HT Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media):

Columbus Dispatch Fails to Note Largely Empty Room at Hillary Speech
By Tom Blumer | September 11, 2015 | 1:37 AM EDT

Though it's not exactly a secret that supporting John Kasich is hardly an indicator of genuine conservatism, Buckeye State liberals frequently whine that the Columbus Dispatch is a right-wing rag which gets behind Ohio's Republican Governor at every turn.

If the Dispatch is so instinctively conservative, how does one explain reporter Darrel Rowland's apparent original exercise in cheerleading as he covered Hillary Clinton's Thursday appearance at the Columbus Athenaeum, a historic building whose meeting hall has a capacity of 1,250? Rowland, unlike his colleagues in the national establishment press, failed to note the existence of quite an expanse of empty space at the event.

At AP, Little Coverage of Dem Candidates' Complaints About Their — and Obama's — Economy
By Tom Blumer | September 8, 2015 | 3:21 PM EDT

Democrats' current and potential candidates for their party's 2016 presidential nomination continue to complain about various aspects of the economy. They continue to make no connection between their complaints and the fact that Democrat Barack Obama has been in the White House for over six years. Obama has for the most part operated either under the conditions created by the 2009-2010 Congress or, when resisted, by unilaterally ruling through executive orders and arbitrary regulatory actions.

Establishment press outlets, likely recognizing the candidates' hypocrisy, mostly fail to carry their complaints — and when they do, they make no attempt to note that the candidates are citing areas the Obama administration has either failed to address, or has attempted to address counterproductively. This pattern of behavior became so obvious yesterday as a result of Vice President Joe Biden's appearance in Pittsburgh that National Review and IJ Review contributor Stephen Miller tweeted the following:

AP Report on Hillary's Email 'Worries' Ignores Judge's Order, Reuters Bombshell
By Tom Blumer | August 21, 2015 | 4:16 PM EDT

The time stamp on an Associated Press report on Hillary Clinton's email "worries" ("CLINTON FACING FRESH WORRIES IN CONGRESS OVER EMAILS") by Ken Thomas and Julie Bykowicz this morning is 11:21 a.m. Eastern Time.

Despite that time stamp, the report fails to mention a bombshell report from Reuters ("Dozens of Clinton emails were classified from the start, U.S. rules suggest") originally posted at 5:17 a.m. (time stamp has since been updated). Going even further back, the AP story fails to mention a Thursday afternoon story about how "A federal judge has ordered the State Department to cooperate with the investigation into the Hillary Clinton private email scandal." The decision to ignore these developments is in all likelihood deliberate.

Word Non-Association at AP: 'Hillary' and 'Crime'
By Tom Blumer | August 15, 2015 | 10:49 AM EDT

All you need to know about the Associated Press's interest in accurately reporting current developments in the investigations into 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's private email server is this: A search at its national site on "Hillary crime" (not in quotes) returns nothing.

Ken Thomas's coverage of the former Secretary of State's "forceful defense" last night in "a speech before influential Iowa Democrats" is all too typical: Mrs. Clinton gets to say that all of this is "partisan games" involving "playing politics." All I see is substance-free whining. "My opponents don't like me" is not a defense. Several paragraphs from Ken's calamity follow the jump:

Covering Hillary's Voting Demagoguery, Press Ignores Ohio's 28 Days of Early Voting
By Tom Blumer | June 6, 2015 | 9:17 PM EDT

Hillary's Clinton has called for what a Washington Post headline describes as a "sweeping expansion of voter access." While falsely accusing Republicans of preventing young people and minorities from voting, Mrs. Clinton is really pushing for widespread opportunities for fraud combined with a heavy dose of incumbent protection.

From reading the establishment press's coverage of Mrs. Clinton's "ambitious agenda" (that's what the New York Times called it), you would think that Ohio has one of the nation's most restrictive early-voting arrangments. It's not so, and Ohio Governor John Kasich justifiably rebutted that perception after Mrs. Clinton's speech.

NYT: $500K to OFA Gets You Quarterly Access to Obama; Admin's Carney Dodges, Walks Away; AP Builds Denial Firewall
By Tom Blumer | February 26, 2013 | 9:17 AM EST

It's hard to imagine that Nicholas Confessore and his editors at the overwhelmingly Obama-friendly New York Times were just making things up when he reported over the weekend in a Page A1 story that the Obama campaign's Organizing For America operation, now "rebooted" as the supposedly independent Organizing For Action, "will rely heavily on a small number of deep-pocketed donors ... whose influence on political campaigns Mr. Obama once deplored," granting them quarterly access to the Obama if they raise $500,000 or more.

According to Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, when asked about the story, in Spiering's words, "asserted that OFA was an 'independent organization' that just happened to support the president’s policy agenda," "refused to address the New York Times reporting," and "ended the press briefing as reporters were still asking questions and fled the podium." If the late Tony Snow had done this while serving as press secretary under George W. Bush, we'd be seeing a continuous loop of the walkout on network TV all day long. The key paragraphs from the Times story, the reaction of MSNBC's Chuck Todd follow the jump, and the Associated Press's non-denial denial firewall follow the jump.

AP Reports Mislead on Breakdown of Obama's Proposed Tax Hikes, Reductions in Projected Spending
By Tom Blumer | November 15, 2012 | 1:26 PM EST

Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I noted how several reports from the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press (here, here, and here) buried the major news about President Obama's opening demand to Congress over resolving the "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes scheduled to take effect on January 1. His demand for $1.6 trillion in tax increases over the next ten years is twice what he sought during the August 2011 debt-ceiling negotiations. You have to go to middle or near-ending paragraphs to get that from the three AP reports linked above.

Those three reports also each contain an additional paragraph which allows the administration's misstatement of its alleged "balance" between tax increases and reductions in projected levels of spending (falsely characterized as "cuts") to stand unchallenged:

Several AP Reports Bury Obama's Demand for Twice as Much in Tax Hikes
By Tom Blumer | November 15, 2012 | 11:33 AM EST

When it comes to reporting on the what the White House wants to achieve in talks with Congress about averting the "fiscal cliff," one apparent theme at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has been "Bury the lede about the size of Obama's tax increases." I'll cover another theme ("Let them get away with misstating the 'balanced approach'") in a later post.

President Obama now wants $1.6 trillion in tax increases over the next ten years, which is double the amount he sought during last year's debt-limit standoff. In ordinary times with a responsible press corps, such a massive change in posture would be headline-driving material, but not at AP, which appears to be doing its utmost to ensure that most Americans don't know about it while still being able to claim (sort of) that "Well, we told 'em."

AP Panic Is Evident Over Obama's 'Private Sector Is Just Fine' Comment, Non-Walkback
By Tom Blumer | June 8, 2012 | 11:47 PM EDT

Today at a press conference, President Barack Obama said that "we’ve created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government ..."

Later, in a cleanup attempt, in what the press is claiming is a walkback, Obama really didn't walk it back: "Listen, it is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine. That's the reason I had the press conference. ... what I've been saying consistently over the last year, we've actually seen some good momentum in the private sector. We've seen 4.3 million jobs created -- 800,000 this year alone -- record corporate profits. And so that has not been the biggest drag on the economy." He never pulled back from saying that "the private sector is doing fine." The abject panic at the Associated Press is evident in tonight's report by Ken Thomas and Philip Elliott (HT to a NewsBusters tipster; bolds and numbered tags are mine):