Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times chronicled another example of the Obama administration’s historic resistance to the free flow of information: an “aggressive assault” curtailing the ability of inspectors general to get access to records inside their agencies.
This inspector-general system was created in 1978 as a post-Watergate reform, so it looks a little ironic that a liberal Democrat is trampling on the Watergate reformers of his own ilk.
Eric Lichtblau and Alexandra Stevenson made the front of the New York Times by taking pains to make a major donor to Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, sound suspicious, even sinister, digging up unflattering (and irrelevant) details and finding two liberal Democratic congressmen to criticize him.
Everyone proposes drinking games for the State of the Union speech. But it’s not just the president that can drive you to drink. It’s the opportunistic media elites deciding which branches of government have too much power, depending on which branches the Democrats presently control.
After a lot of stalemate in 2013, the partisan media think it’s high time for the executive branch to go completely around the legislative branch. They think that now that Congress has proven itself unwilling to provide Barack Obama with the historical greatness he deserves, they should and must be driven around like roadkill. They’ll have no talk of an imperial presidency, let alone autocracy.
News that the New York Times and Washington Post kept secret until recently the secret U.S. drone base in Saudi Arabia is once again raising questions on the paper's politicized double standards on keeping state secrets related to the war on terror.
Contrast the deference paid to the Obama administration's request for secrecy, going along with the national security arguments advanced by Obama (until Wednesday's expose of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, Obama's choice to head the CIA) with how the paper routinely leaked secrets during the Bush administration that may have hurt anti-terrorist programs. Here are just some of the national security low-lights and double standards Times Watch has documented at the Times over the years.
The media complicity in President Obama's drone strategy gets more and more astonishing with each passing day.
On Wednesday, Britain's Guardian published a piece with the incredible sub-headline "New York Times and Washington Post knew about secret drone base in Saudi Arabia but agreed not to disclose it to the public."
Friday's New York Times teased on the front page two profiles of prominent figures in the gun control debate (conservative David Keene and liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg). Can you guess which one got more respectful treatment?
Reporter Eric Lichtblau's profile of National Rifle Association leader and "bombastic" conservative activist David Keene was hostile and unduly personal ("N.R.A. Leader, Facing Challenge in Wake of Shooting, Rarely Shies From Fight.") Lichtblau put Keene on defense right off the bat: