How the NYT blatantly spins for Obama on Ebola
These are difficult times, so it makes sense for America’s journalistic institutions to locate new revenue streams.
Just look at the New York Times, always an industry leader: It’s become the official stenographer of the Obama White House.
On Saturday, The Times ran a story about the president and his response to the Ebola outbreak that read like it was dictated word for word by the president’s top men.
If I were a stockholder in the New York Times Co., I would certainly hope the paper was properly compensated for the front-page placement of this naked political advertisement.
The only thing missing from it was the opening line that all political commercials are now required to include: “I’m Barack Obama and I approve of this message.”
According to the article, the president isn’t actually as supportive of his administration’s Ebola-fighting team as he has sounded over the past couple of weeks.
Quite the opposite: “Amid Assurances on Ebola,” the headline ran, “Obama Is Said to Seethe.”
The White House, anonymously of course, wants people to think the president shares their disbelief at how ham-handed and inconsistent his team’s conduct has been — no matter that he has repeatedly praised it and has himself contributed to the appearance of cluelessness with his own public statements on the Ebola problem.
Obama’s administration was slow to provide the exact details of who Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person in the US to be diagnosed with Ebola, had come in contact with.Photo: AP
And so it was time for a story revealing that the president is really quite furious — but in private.
The president’s problem with his administration’s response is that it’s not “tight,” whatever that means. He was “visibly angry” when he used the word at a meeting on Wednesday for which he canceled a campaign trip (no! not a campaign trip!).
“White House officials have sought to balance [two] imperatives,” wrote Michael D. Shear and Mark Landler: “Insisting the dangers to the American public were being overstated in the news media, while also moving quickly to increase the president’s demonstration of action.”
That last clause isn’t in English, which suggests that Shear’s and Landler’s skills at shorthand aren’t all they should be.
They might want to bone up for the next assignment, lest their jobs be outsourced to a dial-up Dictaphone Call Center in Bangalore.
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