Liberals are tweeting around a Washington Post article in Monday’s paper with the online headline “Under Trump, inconvenient data is being sidelined.” Translation: The Trump administration is against the free flow of information on government websites.
White House reporter Juliet Eilperin summarized: “The Trump administration has removed or tucked away a wide variety of information that until recently was provided to the public, limiting access, for instance, to disclosures about workplace violations, energy efficiency, and animal welfare abuses.”
So let’s ask a mischievous question: If this information is so vital, how has The Washington Post actually covered it? Sometimes never. Take this example of things scrubbed from the EPA website: “within a week of President Trump’s inauguration, the White House retired the two-year-old Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard, which ranks firms with major federal contracts on their energy efficiency and policies to curb carbon output.”
A quick Nexis search for “Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard” over the last two years brings up one story in the Post....Today’s story.
Then there’s animal welfare: “the Agriculture Department has taken off-line animal welfare enforcement records, including abuses in dog breeding operations and horse farms that alter the gait of racehorses through the controversial practice of ‘soring’ their legs.”
“Abuses” and “dog breeding”? Over the past five years, before the Trump inauguration, there are two Post pieces: an Outlook column by Kerry Lauerman on May 29, 2016, and an obscure April 21, 2016 column on page T-20.
Horses and “soring”? Over the past five years, before the Trump inauguration, there are just three mentions of soring, all in 2014: a blog post on November 11, a 69-word gossip item on Priscilla Presley on February 27, and an obscure February 20 column on page T-20 that’s mostly about pit bulls.
Some of this sidelined “data” is just educated guessing: “Officials also removed websites run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department that provided scientific information about climate change, eliminating access. for instance, to documents evaluating the danger that the desert ecology in the Southwest could face from future warming.”
(The Post routinely suppresses the data that Eilperin’s husband, Andrew Light, was an eco-activist on the Obama administration’s Paris Treaty climate-negotiation team, so her complaining about Trump’s stance is quite possibly an echo from her dinner table.)
Let's ask one more mischievous question; did the Post find it offensive eight years ago when the Obama administration changed government websites to their ideological priorities? A quick search finds a front-page story from January 22, 2009 by Anne Kornblut headlined "Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages." The complaint was that the Bush administration was so antiquated the Obama team got off to a slow start refashioning their websites.
(For complete propaganda on Obama's Web genius at that time, see CNN.)
