NY Times & Obama Conduct Investigations; Find Selves Innocent

Now I feel better:

According to a study by the media scholars Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter, The Times’s coverage of the president’s first year in office was significantly more favorable than its first-year coverage of three predecessors who also brought a new party to power in the White House: George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. 

Writing for the periodical Politics and Policy, the authors were so struck by the findings that they wondered, “Did The Times, perhaps in response to the aggressive efforts by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal to seize market share, decide to tilt more to the left than it had in the past?” I strongly doubt that. Based on conversations with Times reporters and editors who cover the campaign and Washington, I think they see themselves as aggressive journalists who don’t play favorites. Still, a strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by collateral factors — for example, political views that creep into nonpolitical coverage.

Shocker, the Times actually conducted a study to determine they were nicer to The One than Bush or Reagan. I guess even those who work for the Times don't read the Times. Anyway, I'm guessing the investigation I emphasized above went something like this:

Investigator: Do you consider yourself an unbiased writer and do you consider what you write for the Times to be unbiased?

Reporter or Editor (wearing an Obama 2012 button): Yes.

Investigator: Thanks for your time. Glad we cleared that up.

But it gets better. The Obama staff conducted their own internal investigation into whether or not anyone on said staff was involved in the hooker fiasco in Cartagena Colombia:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced that White House legal counsel has concluded no White House staff engaged in any "misconduct" in Cartagena. 

"The decision to conduct a review here, internally, was simply done out of due diligence," Carney said. "There is no indication of any misconduct by any member of the White House advance team or staff." 

He added that "there have been no specific, credible allegations of misconduct by anyone on the White House advance team or White House staff." Carney refused to give any details on the investigation, such as whether the investigation included checking hotel records in Colombia or interviewing the White House advance team that went to Cartagena. 

"There's no point in getting into the details of this internal review except to say that it was conducted," he said.

In summation, Carney said "we investigated ourselves and found ourselves to have been completely innocent of any charges". Well thanks for that, Jay. Case closed, nothing to see here.

And so we have the Obama years in a nutshell; his Justice Department have been involved in a major operation where guns were allowed to be sold to drug dealers and taken into Mexico and then ended up killing a federal agent. His Energy Department allowed tax dollars to be distributed to companies that had extremely questionable business plans and billions were lost. Add to that myriad other irregularities that would have dogged Bush and Reagan for years and you can see that story one about the Times bias is a bag full of bullshit because if they even remotely dug into story two or the others I've listed (not to belabor this point but one included the death of a federal agent by a US gun sold with the consent of Obama's top cop), we'd be looking at Obama climbing up out of the lowest approval numbers for any incumbent, ever. Er, never mind.