NY Times Misses Link Between Anti-Civil Rights Zealot And Right-Wing's "Dark Money ATM"

MEAGAN HATCHER-MAYS/Media Matters For America:

The New York Times missed the opportunity to explore the close connection between Donors Trust, the right-wing's "Dark Money ATM," and the conservative activist behind high-profile Supreme Court cases that are successfully attacking decades-old civil rights precedent.

The Times recently ran a profile of Edward Blum, the director of the Project on Fair Representation, a non-profit group that solicits plaintiffs to challenge civil rights policy and law like affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. The article reported that this self-described "one-man organization" receives funding from "conservative groups like the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust." This support from some of the right-wing's biggest donors has allowed Blum to pursue high-profile cases that are challenging half a century of civil rights precedent.  

Blum was the driving force behind the failed attempt to overturn constitutional race-conscious admissions policies in the recent case of Abigail Fisher, a white student who sued the University of Texas after she wasdenied admission. Blum also organized the recent challenge to the Voting Rights Act, which successfully gutted a key provision of the Act that protects minority voters from racial discrimination at the polls. Blum is now rolling out new websites to troll for other rejected students in his attempt to once again provide the Supreme Court's conservative justices an opportunity to overturn case law that allows affirmative action.

But the Times provided an incomplete picture of Blum's access to deep-pocketed conservative groups by omitting the fact that Blum also has long-standing ties to the "donor-advised fund" Donors Trust. Mother Jonesrecently coined the "dark money ATM of the conservative movement" to refer to Donors Trust because of its history of raising and handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to libertarian and conservative groups, without disclosing the original sources. Although Blum's website explicitly noted the connection between the Project on Fair Representation and Donors Trust as recently as June 30 and September 9 of last year, he has scrubbed that information from the site, instead claiming to now be affiliated with "Project Liberty, Inc." This new sponsoring organization has the exact same contact information as Donors Trust, which Joan Biskupic of Reuters previously reported "fully financed" Blum's efforts to roll back civil rights law.

This is what Blum's website looked like in 2013, with explicit references to Donors Trust:

And this is what it looked like on April 8, 2014, with references to Donors Trust replaced with Project Liberty:

Tax records from 2012 show that Project Liberty is a grantee many times over of Donors Trust. These same records also show that the Project on Fair Representation was spun off from Donors Trust to "a supporting organization during 2012."

According to the Conservative Transparency website, in 2012 alone Donors Trust donated over $1 million to Project Liberty, conveniently housed at the same address as Donors Trust. In fact, Donors Trust's website still lists the Project on Fair Representation as one of the "current special program funds" it administers, describedas "donor-initiated and donor-funded projects incubated by DonorsTrust and administered at the pleasure of its Board of Directors."

The spotlight of a Times profile could have clarified why this significant financial tie between Blum and Donors Trust is in the process of being buried.

In addition to the Bradley Foundation and the Searle Freedom Trust, Donors Trust's ability to "drape[ ] in secrecy" the right-wing money fueling the current attack on progressive law and policy has also attracteddonations from the Charles Koch-controlled Knowledge and Progress Fund, the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and the Adolph Coors Foundation -- money that has funded conservative groups like Blum's as well as think tanks like the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. As explained by a former top IRS official to the Center for Public Integrity: "Koch is among an exclusive pool of donors who have used Donors Trust as a 'pass-through,' says Marcus Owens, the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, now in private legal practice. 'It obscures the source of the money. It becomes a grant from Donors Trust, not a grant from the Koch brothers.'"

Hopefully, now that the Times has once again turned to the peculiar story of Blum and the Project on Fair Representation, they will investigate his role in this obfuscation as well.

According To Media Reports, Obama Is Responsible For At Least 8 ‘Katrinas’

BY JUDD LEGUM/Think Progress

On Friday, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece comparing the troubled rollout of Obamacare — including a dysfunctional website and the cancelation of some existing individual insurance policies — to President Bush’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina, a tragedy which cost at least 1,833 people their lives. ABC’s Good Morning America featured a similar segment, and both outlets relied on former advisers of George W Bush to bolster their point. But this is just latest in a long line of “Katrinas,” that Barack Obama is responsible for, according to the media. Here is a sampling:

1. BP Oil Spill

“[I]t’s getting baked in a little bit in the media that BP was President Obama’s Katrina.” [NBC News, Brian Williams, 8/29/10]

2. Bank Bailout

“A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editorpublished by The Times last week: ‘President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.’” [New York Times, Frank Rich, 3/21/09]

3. Benghazi Consulate Attack And The IRS

“When House Republicans decided to reopen investigations into the White House and State Department response to the attacks on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, few thought it would inflict any serious damage to the president. Then came an admission from the IRS that it had unfairly singled out conservative groups for scrutiny during the 2012 campaign…This is President Obama’s Katrina moment. If he cannot regain control of the narrative, he will face the same loss of public confidence suffered by President Bush.” [Baltimore Sun, 5/19/13, Todd Eberly]

4. Hurricane Sandy

“I want to show you this report by our own David Lee Miller of a public housing unit in New Jersey, and — I’m sorry, in Brooklyn — devastated. This is Obama’s Katrina. And now the people are seeing that the gas lines and the suffering and the millions without power, the millions without heat, the millions — the ten and thousands that have lost their homes, and the cries for help.” [Fox News, Sean Hannity, 11/5/12]

5. Unemployment

“‘Will The Unemployment Crisis Be Obama’s Katrina?’ There’s a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don’t seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar? Just as Katrina exposed critical weaknesses in the priorities and competence of the Bush administration, the unfolding unemployment disaster is threatening to do the same for the Obama White House.” [Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington,11/23/09]

6. The Underwear Bomber

“To the list of phrases it may be best for political leaders to avoid after a major security incident, add ‘the system worked’ right after ‘Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.’ Just as the public did not really share President George W. Bush’s assessment of how things were going after Hurricane Katrina, so too was there a good deal of skepticism when President Obama’s homeland security secretary declared faith in a system that failed to stop a guy who tried to blow up a passenger jet on Christmas Day.” [New York Times, 12/29/09]

7. Haiti Earthquake

“‘Haiti: Obama’s Katrina.’ Four years ago the initial medical response to Hurricane Katrina was ill equipped, understaffed, poorly coordinated and delayed. Criticism of the paltry federal efforts was immediate and fierce. Unfortunately, the response to the latest international disaster in Haiti has been no better, compounding the catastrophe.” [Wall Street Journal, 1/25/10]

8. Obamacare

“‘Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response.’ President Obama is now threatened by a similar toxic mix. The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.” [New York Times, 11/14/13]

Four years ago, the New York Times derided comparing every Presidential error to Katrina as “a Category 5 cliché.” Melissa Harris Perry, writing in the Nation in 2010, was even harsher: “These metaphors reduce catastrophe to an object lesson, implying that the effects of the disaster have been resolved, that the plot has been resolved and that the continued suffering of our fellow citizens is little more than a literary device.”

For Louisiana Republicans, Hurricane Katrina is Obama’s Katrina — a recent poll found more blame Obama than Bush for the federal response to the 2005 tragedy.

The Media Myth Surrounding Obama's Negative Campaign

By Eric Boehlert/Huffington Post

In his most recent column, the New York Times'Ross Douthat repeated a common media charge about what a harsh campaign President Obama is running this year. Dubbing the president "Mr. Negative," Douthat bemoaned what he saw as Obama's nasty Nixonian streak and a campaign that Douthat claims "started out negative and has escalated to frank character assassination."

This kind of dire rhetoric has become quite common among Beltway pundits and reporters, along with right-wing commentators. Collectively, they have formed a tight-knit narrative about what an almost shockingly negative campaign Obama is running, and how the harsh tone represents the polar opposite of Obama's feel-good run in 2008.

The media chatter really has become deafening. A New York Times news report last month emphasized how both campaigns have gone "relentlessly negative," while a Miami Herald column trumpeted Obama's "seek and destroy" campaign style, built around a "negative onslaught" targeting Romney. (The Herald piece suggested Obama was "doing the same" thing to Romney that the Swift Boat Veterans had done to John Kerry in 2004.) Meanwhile, The Atlantic dubbed Obama's run a "nasty" and "bare knuckle" campaign fueled by "brutal" tactics.

In fact, when the Romney campaign made an ad complaining about how negative Obama's re-election run has been, it cobbled together on-air quotes from CBS's Bob Schieffer, Time's Mark Halperin and the New York Times' David Brooks, all of whom have gone on TV lamenting the tone of Obama's campaign.

But is the claim accurate? Is the Democrat really running some sort of guttural, ruthlessly negative campaign? Is it far and way more negative than his opponent's effort? And is the tone of Obama's 2012 campaign completely different from his 2008 run for election, as the press insists?

No, no, no, and no.

The topic of Obama's supposedly negative campaign has become something of a media obsession, while at the same time the press has shown very little interest in detailing how the Romney campaign is running almost an entirely anti-Obama sales pitch to American voters. Data regarding political ads indicate that Romney and his allies have spent roughly twice as much money this year airing negative ads than Obama and his supporters. And in terms of the ratio of negative-to-positive ads since April, it's been 2-to-1 for the Obama campaign and 5-to-1 for Romney.

From the Times:

Since April, after Mr. Romney became the presumptive nominee, Mr. Obama broadcast negative commercials 118,775 times compared with 56,128 times for positive commercials.

In the same time period, Mr. Romney ran negative spots 51,973 times and positive spots 11,921, according to an analysis from Kantar Media, which tracks political advertising. This does not include the Republican "super PAC" ads that are almost entirely attacks on the president.

While the research showed that Obama's campaign has been running more negative ads recently, the overall numbers indicate attack ads still make up a far larger portion of the Romney strategy.

And as the Times article indicated, those calculations don't include super PAC ads that have hammered Obama's mercilessly all year. In fact, if you add up the amount of money the Obama campaign and its top three supporting super PAC's and outside allies have spent on negative ads this year, it totals approximately $54 million. The Romney campaign and its top three supporters? They have spent more than $110 million on negative ads in 2012. (Some of that, of course, was spent during the Republican primary season.)

But remember, it's Obama who's guilty of running a nasty campaign.

One media hook for its endless commentary about negativity is the claim that Obama has renounced his 2008 theme of "Hope and Change," and that he's a hypocrite for attacking his opponent because he once pledged to change the tone of politics in America. But an examination of four years ago reveals that Obama's run was anchored by ads that routinely attacked his opponent, which is how White House campaigns have unfolded for decades now.

Earlier this year the Washington Post looked back at Obama's 2008 campaign and the type of advertising it included. Citing the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, the Post concluded ads critical of Sen. John McCain were quite common [emphasis added]: 

The report concluded that McCain ran more negative ads than Obama in July, August and November, while Obama ran more negative ads in September and October.

...

If you only count September, October and November, Obama appears to have a slight edge in negative ads, but virtually all of McCain's ads were negative.

Meaning, there's nothing revolutionary in terms of what the Obama campaign is doing in 2012. Yes, the amount of money the Democrat and Republican candidates are spending continues to shatter all previous benchmarks. That is not in dispute. But in terms of the content and the tone, the race remains reminiscent of previous White House contests.

That context seems to be eluding many in the media. Appearing on C-SPAN last week, Kenneth Goldstein, president of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, which monitors political advertising content, made the important point that "just because one campaign is talking about the other campaign doesn't mean that it's unfair. It doesn't mean that it's nasty."

Goldstein added, "I don't think we've seen anything that's particularly below the belt so far."

NY Times Whitewashes O’Keefe’s ACORN, NPR Video Scams

 by Eric Boehlert/Media Matters

Assigning a Rush Limbaugh fan and biographer to profile right-wing activist James O’Keefe wasn’t exactly a daring choice by editors at The New York Times Magazine. The fact that the resulting puff piece is a predictably soft retread of O’Keefe’s often-told tale should surprise no one.

What is odd is that the Times would publish such comically inaccurate characterizations of O’Keefe’s adventures in undercover video stings; stings that have proven time and again he’s incapable of telling the truth.

Those are the facts. They are not in dispute. But in the loving hands of Times writer Zev Chafets, O’Keefe is portrayed as an enterprising, muckraking journalist. And in the loving hands of Zev Chafets, O’Keefe is portrayed exactly the way O’Keefe wants to be portrayed.

I realize that’s Chafets’ niche at the Times, to bring his partisan, conservative perspective when writing profiles of partisan conservative media figures, and to do his best to paper over anything unflattering about the subject at hand. That’s what he did with his New York Times Magazine cover story on Limbaugh in 2008. (The super-soft profile helped Chafets land a Ditto-ography book deal.)

And I understand why Chafets likes the very easy gig. It makes little sense, though, why the Timeswould be interested in publishing this kind of predictable feature about O’Keefe. Regardless of the motivation, what about the facts? What about O’Keefe’s ACORN and NPR stings for instance, and the controversy that soon engulfed him over allegations he had edited his clips in order to concocts sinister stories? How does the Times deal with those issues?

Not well.

A quick NPR refresher: Last March, O’Keefe unveiled a video sting designed to expose NPR’s liberal bias. It featured NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller having lunch with two potential (albeit fake) deep-pocket Muslim donors and Schiller making disparaging comments about Republicans and Tea Party members. We soon discovered, via Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze, that the tapes had been highly edited and done so in an unethical way to make the Schiller comments seem much more damning than originally believed.

Now here, in its entirety, is how Chafets deals with the firestorm that erupted around O’Keefe’s NPR tapes when it was they revealed they were fraudulent.

When it was suggested that the tapes had been dishonestly edited, O’Keefe invited people to watch them in their entirety. “He said it, that’s just a fact,” Dana Davis Rehm, a spokesman for NPR, said of Ron Schiller. In the aftermath, NPR conducted sessions on ethics for its support and operational staff and is planning to publish updated ethics guidelines in September. 

Gee, that doesn’t sound like that big of a deal: People raised questions and O’Keefe graciously invited them to view the full tapes.

Gimme a break.

From Time [emphasis added]:

Schiller did say some bad things, the Blaze found. But the short video took them out of context, like a bad reality show, and made them sound worse. It transposed remarks from a different part of the meetingto make it seem as if Schiller were amused by the group's "goal" of spreading Shari'a law. It left examples of his complimenting Republicans on the cutting-room floor. And that Tea Party quote? Schiller was, for at least part of it, describing the views of some Republican friends. Somehow — oops! — O'Keefe left that bit out.

You can add to those key points the fact that Schiller clearly stated on several occasions that funding donations, no matter how generous, have no effect on NPR’s news operation.

In other words, the entire premise of O’Keefe’s NPR gotcha was proven to be a fraud. There weren’t simply implications the tapes had been deceitfully cropped.  That was proven to be the case. Period.

It makes you wonder how anyone at the Times can square that factual assessment with the idea that it was merely “suggested” that O’Keefe’s ACORN tapes had been “dishonestly edited.” It also makes you wonder why the Times assigned Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan to write puff piece about James O’Keefe.

Meanwhile, ACORN. Here’s Chafets:

His takedown of Acorn was even more devastating, although Bertha Lewis, Acorn’s former chief executive, contends that the videos were dishonest. “He is demon, a liar and a cheat,” she says. “What he did was despicable. He created a fiction.” Bertha Lewis still insists that Acorn did not offer advice on how to break the law. Clark Hoyt, a former public editor for The New York Times, reviewed O’Keefe’s raw footage and edited tapes and concluded that “the most damning words match the transcripts and the audio, and do not seem out of context.” There is no doubt that O’Keefe disseminated only the material that supported his thesis about Acorn, but this kind of selectivity is the norm in advocacy journalism. 

Really? It’s normal in advocacy journalism to withhold exculpatory information in order to tell the story you want to tell? It’snormal to dishonestly edit videos in order to give viewers a false impression of what actually occurred? And it’s normal to flat out manufacture lies, the way O’Keefe did by suggesting he entered ACORN offices decked out in a Halloween-ish pimp costume?

This is just embarrassing.

Meanwhile, for those interested in detailed reviews of O’Keefe’s ACORN production, at least three of them have been conducted. All  three confirmed that while some ACORN employees behaved inappropriately in the O’Keefe videos, they did not break the law. And all three confirmed that O’Keefe did severely edit the tapes.  Also, a 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that O'Keefe's undercover videotaping may have broken laws in California and Maryland.

But for some reason Chafets does not mention the findings that completely undercut O’Keefe’s ACORN hoax. (Or the fact O’Keefe is currently being sued by an ACORN worker in response to one of the undercover videos.)  Chafets also ignored the pimp lie that O’Keefe spread with the help of his mentor, Andrew Breitbart.

Then again, in telling the O’Keefe tale Chafets also opts to make no mention of the fact that last summer O’Keefe planned to set a bizarre, floating trap to sexually humiliate a CNN reporter. 

So yes, the Times does a great job dressing up O’Keefe and pretending he’s an important person.

Lawrence O’Donnell ridicules New York Times for hyping Palin run

By David Edwards

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said Thursday that The New York Times had “jumped the shark” for suggesting that Sarah Palin might run for president in 2012.

O’Donnell has said for months that Palin won’t run because no recent failed vice presidential candidate has ever gone on to become president.

Watch this video from MSNBC’s The Last Word, broadcast May 26, 2011.

NYT calls out Rasmussen for conservative bias in Wisconsin poll

By Sahil Kapur

The New York Times accused Rasmussen Reports of lacing a recent survey on the Wisconsin protests with conservative bias, elevating longstanding critiques about the polling firm's credibility.

The survey, released Monday, asked four questions about the Wisconsin clash over Republican Gov. Scott Walker's budget plan, which would strip the collective bargaining rights of public employees and force them to pay more for benefits. It found that 48 percent of "likely voters" agreed with Walker, while 38 percent supported his opponents.

Nate Silver of the Times' FiveThirtyEight blog is a trusted polling expert who came to fame after correctly predicting the outcomes of 49 of 50 states in the 2008 election. In a Monday evening posting, he took issue with the manner in which several of Rasmussen's questions were asked, decreeing that they were designed to engender a pro-Walker bias.

Two of the questions, Silver wrote, misrepresented the nature of the opposition in a "blatant" attempt to diminish sympathy for them before asking the respondent whose side they were on. The penultimate question was "a talking point posed as a question," he declared.

The questions were about whether the respondent thinks public or private sector employees make more money, and whether "teachers, firemen and policemen" should be allowed to go on strike -- which is illegal in most places for uniformed services.

"Because of the problems with question design, my advice would be simply to disregard the Rasmussen Reports poll, and to view their work with extreme skepticism going forward," Silver concluded.

Rasmussen, fending off years of criticisms of harboring a Republican-leaning bias, is taken very seriously by the mainstream press. Its founder and president, Scott Rasmussen, has openly supported conservative causes and is a former writer for the conspiracy-minded website World Net Daily.

It released hundreds of surveys in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, many of which made prominent news in major outlets. The Times reported that Rasmussen "overestimated the standing of Republican candidates by roughly 4 percentage points on average."

"Rasmussen should probably just drop the pretense that they are non-partisan," Silver wrote Monday on Twitter.

M.C.L comment: I already knew Rasmussen was a biased piece of crap the only time I take any of their polls seriously is when they show a Democrat doing well in something..

NY Times falsely reports that Obama took BP PAC money for 2008 campaign

From Media Matters:

The New York Times reported that "in the 2008 election cycle," Barack Obama "took in $77,000" from BP "executives and its political action committee." In fact, Obama received $71,051 in BP-linked donations in 2008, and all of that money came from BP employees, not from BP's PAC, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

NY Times: Obama "took in $77,000 from company executives and its political action committee" in 2008 election cycle

From a June 18 New York Times article:

Democrats continued to make use of Mr. Barton's apology to BP, using it to portray Republicans as beholden to big oil. Mr. Barton, the senior Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, worked as a consultant to Atlantic Richfield Oil and Gas Company before being elected to Congress. He has long been one of the top beneficiaries of campaign donations from big energy companies, cornerstones of the Texas economy.

But in going after Republicans, the Democrats' attacks gloss over a more complicated picture.

The largest beneficiary of campaign donations from BP in the 2008 election cycle, for instance, was President Obama, who took in $77,000 from company executives and its political action committee. This year, Senator Blanche Lincoln, Democrat of Arkansas and chairwoman of the Agriculture Committee, leads all candidates with $286,000 in donations from oil and gas companies.

In fact, Obama received no BP PAC money for 2008 campaign

Obama received no PAC money from BP during his presidential campaign. Contrary to the Times' claim that Obama "took in $77,000" from BP "executives and its political action committee," during "the 2008 election cycle," Obama received $71,051 in BP-linked contributions during his presidential campaign, and $6,000 in 2004, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. All of the BP-linked money Obama received for his 2008 campaign came from BP employees, not from BP's PAC or from the company itself. A spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics confirmed that "the $71,051 that Obama received during the 2008 election cycle was entirely from BP employees." The CRP spokesman also stated that "Obama did not accept contributions from political action committees, so none of this money is from BP's PAC."

Donations from BP or its employees represent 0.01 percent of Obama's total fundraising. As Media Matters senior fellow Jamison Foser has noted, Obama has raised more than $799 million for his campaigns. The $77,051 he has received from BP's PAC and employees accounts for less than 0.01 percent of Obama's total campaign contributions.

FLASHBACK: When the NY Times ignored gaping holes in candidate Bush's war record

by Eric Boehlert

One of the striking talking points that came out of The New York Times in the wake of its controversial article last week about whether Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal had, over the years, exaggerated his military service during the Vietnam War era, was the insistence from the Times that the story was a deeply important one and one that needed to be covered. The Times, faced with stiff criticism for its handling of the Blumenthal story, seemed to suggest it had a moral obligation, not to mention a newsroom duty, to look closely at the military service rhetoric from a New England politician running in a statewide election.

A Times flack even appeared to lecture Blumenthal about how he needed to be straight with Nutmeg State voters.

But I'm having a tough time buying the Times' sudden devotion to the topic, considering that during the 2000 presidential campaign, the same Times staff went out of its way not to report on the web of detailed allegations that Republican George Bush had failed to fulfill his military obligation while defending Texas air space as an Air National Guard pilot and that the presidential candidate had routinely lied about that fact. For that story, the Times team shrugged. But it's decided this spring to go all-in over Blumenthal? Seems strange.

Now, I realize that it's been an entire decade since the 2000 campaign played out and that most people don't recall what the coverage was like -- and specifically have virtually no memory of how Bush's Air National Guard story was covered. But I'm not overstating things when I say the Times' stubborn failure to cover the controversy really did mark one of the true cases of journalistic malpractice of that crucial campaign season.

The full scope of Bush's lack of Guard service was revealed on May 23, 2000, when The Boston Globe's Walter Robinson reported a Page One piece detailing all the holes in Bush's military service: "1-Year Gap in Bush's Guard Duty; No Record of Airman at Drills in 1972-73."

After combing through 160 pages of military documents and interviewing Bush's former commanders, Robinson reported how Bush's flying career came to an abrupt and unexplained end in the spring of 1972 when Bush asked to be transferred so that he could work on a family friend's Senate campaign in Alabama. But Bush's Alabama commander, Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, told the Globe that Bush never showed up for duty. (A trained pilot, Bush asked to be reassigned to an Alabama base that had no airplanes.) In 2000, a group of veterans offered a $3,500 reward for anyone who could confirm Bush's Alabama service -- and nobody from Bush's unit stepped forward.

What did the Times do with the Globe's startling A1 campaign scoop, suggesting Bush may have gone AWOL during his mandatory Guard service? The Times ignored it, with a passion. (And yes, this was the same Times news team that spent the 2000 campaign routinely casting aspersions on Al Gore's character and trustworthiness.)

Consider this: The Times' Frank Bruni tailed Bush obsessively on the campaign trail that year, filing more than 200 dispatches. But he never once referenced in print the Globe allegations. (Just try to imagine the Times' reaction if, during the 2000 campaign, the same Boston Globe had reported on Page One that Gore's discharge papers from Vietnam showed he rigged his wartime duty and orchestrated an early exit by simply refusing to report for duty during the final two years of his commitment.)

During 2000, the Guard story never landed on Page One of the agenda-setting New York Times. In fact, the Guard story barely even made it inside the daily, while key facets were boycotted. Here's how many times in 2000 the Times, supposedly busy scouring the backgrounds of the candidates, reported the fact that Bush was grounded by his Guard superiors in 1972 for failing a mandatory physical: zero.

Just more than a week after The Boston Globe had raised serious questions about Bush's Guard service, the Times ran a May 31, 2000, story headlined "Bush Questions Gore's Fitness for Commander in Chief." The article noted that some were "questioning the nature of Mr. Bush's military service in the Vietnam War," but did not provide any further detail about the substance of the criticism. Instead, the Times simply reported that "Mr. Bush did not serve overseas but instead served in Houston in the Texas Air National Guard." The article made no mention whatsoever of the thorny allegations swirling about Bush's lack of military service.

On July 11, 2000, the Times' Nicholas Kristof wrote a biographical feature on Bush's life during the Vietnam War: " Close to Home; Bush's Choice in War: Devoid of Passion or Anxiety." The feature omitted any reference to questions about Bush's absenteeism, getting grounded, failing to take a physical, and walking away from the Guard for months at a time.

Kristof actually spent most of 2000 carefully -- even aggressively -- avoiding the issue of Bush's Guard service, which wasn't easy since, during that campaign season, Kristof wrote nearly 50,000 words on Bush, the equivalent of a 170-page book. Kristof functioned as the Times' in-house Bush biographer, and yet Kristof failed to report completely on the uncomfortable Guard issue, even after The Boston Globe pointed out all the holes in Bush's record.

But Kristof was hardly alone at the Times. It was a determined team effort to play dumb.

In late July, the Times got around to addressing Bush's wartime experience with an article headlined "Governor Bush's Journey; After Yale, Bush Ambled Amiably Into His Future." Certainly a piece focusing on Bush's post-Yale years in the late '60s and early '70s would center its attention on the troubling allegations raised by The Boston Globe, right? Wrong. It wasn't until 2,500 words into the article that the thorny issue was detailed. In total, the Times article dedicated about 300 words to the entire controversy, giving readers the sketchiest outlines of Bush's perplexing missing year from the Texas Air National Guard. And that fleeting, buried reference represented the bulk of the Times' coverage for most the entire campaign.

In a September 4 article on the campaign debate over military readiness, the Times referenced the fact that "Mr. Bush trained as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War." The Times politely omitted any mention of Bush's Guard controversy.

Twenty days later, the Times reported, "An array of veterans, including senior officers who served under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gore, last week endorsed Mr. Bush, who served as a fighter pilot in the Texas National Guard during the Vietnam War and was, for the record, a lieutenant." Again, the article politely omitted any mention of Bush's Guard controversy.

It wasn't until the eve of the election that the Times set aside an entire news article to examine some of the crucial questions raised by the Globe. The Times' conclusion in November 2000? See for yourself [emphasis added]:

Two Democratic senators today called on Gov. George W. Bush to release his full military record to resolve doubts raised by a newspaper about whether he reported for required drills when he was in the Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973.

But a review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns may be unfounded. Documents reviewed by The Times showed that Mr. Bush served in at least 9 of the 17 months in question.

That's right, half a year after the Globe published its scoop, the Times finally addressed the issue, announcing in the second paragraph that some questions about Bush's Guard service were "unfounded." ("The Times got spun," was how the Globe's Walter Robinson later described the Times' Guard reporting.)

Indeed, by the time Election Day rolled around, the Times had failed to report that in 1972, the Texas Air National Guard grounded Bush for failing to take a required physical exam and that neither Bush nor his aides could point to a single person who saw Bush -- the hard-to-miss son of a congressman and U.S. ambassador -- perform his active duty requirements during the final 18 months of his service. (It would be 45 months after the first Boston Globe report -- February 2004 -- before the Times finally spelled out to readers with any kind of specificity the facts regarding Bush's skipped physical exam.)

Bottom line: In 2000, candidate Bush's military record during the Vietnam War was very much in doubt, as was Bush's repeated explanation as to why, after receiving $1 million worth of taxpayer-funded flight instruction, he had essentially vanished from the Guard and failed to fly, show up for monthly drills, or even take a mandatory physical. Yet back in 2000,The New York Times didn't seem to care much about that military-record story. And the Times newsroom seemed to make a decision not to cover the controversy -- a controversy that, given the historically close nature of the 2000 race, could have tipped the balance of the vote.

So, yes, given that stark background, it's tough to make sense of the Times' recent dedication to pursuing the Blumenthal story.

NY Times reportedly had the full Blumenthal video before publishing horribly misleading hit piece

From Media Matters:

Politico's Ken Vogel tonight writes that New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt is expected to publish a Sunday column detailing the findings of his investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Times' May 18 front page article about how Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal had previously described his military service. And based on a reported email from Times executive editor Bill Keller to Hoyt, the Times had the full version of a 2008 speech yet chose to focus solely on one comment in the speech while ignoring another comment that was directly relevant to the story of how Blumenthal had described his military service.

At the center of the Times' coverage was a brief video clip of Blumenthal giving a 2008 speech during which he said he had "served in Vietnam." The article and video clip on the Times' homepage only included that Blumenthal quote and omitted his comment earlier in the same speech when he stated that he "served in the military during the Vietnam era in the Marine Corps."

To repeat: In the full video, Blumenthal states both that he "served in the military during the Vietnam era in the Marine Corps" and that he "served in Vietnam." But the Times published an article highlighting only the second comment while totally ignoring the first comment.

That's a horribly misleading framing of how Blumenthal described his military service.

Vogel's article tonight shows that the Times had the full video of the 2008 Blumenthal speech and had "reviewed the entire event" prior to publishing its May 18 article:

Here's Vogel:

Blumenthal's allies got a helpful - if unintentional - boost from their main rival, when McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive, briefly featured on her campaign website a blog post crediting her opposition researchers with passing on to the Times a video recording of a March 2008 speech in which Blumenthal recalled "the days that I served in Vietnam." That passage, which was prominently mentioned at the beginning of the Times story, was the most compelling piece of evidence against Blumenthal and was featured in a video posted on the Times' website. But both the story and the web video excluded a passage from earlier in the speech in which Blumenthal accurately characterized his military service by saying that he "served in the military during the Vietnam era in the Marine Corps." McMahon's campaign posted on YouTube a more complete video of the speech including the accurate characterization, which the Associated Press detailed in a story that prompted some liberals to question whether the Times had the full video of the speech and, if so, why the story didn't mention the earlier characterization. "That's awfully misleading, isn't it?" wrote Jamison Foser, a senior fellow at the liberal press watchdog Media Matters. "Given that Republican Linda McMahon's campaign has taken credit for feeding the Times the Blumenthal story, you have to wonder if it gave the Times the incomplete video, as well. Either way, the Times should explain why it chose to omit Blumenthal's correct characterization of his service." In his emailed response to ombudsman Hoyt, Keller asserted that "Blumenthal's statement early in the event that he 'served in the military during the Vietnam era in the Marine Corps' says nothing about whether he served in Vietnam or stateside, and says nothing about whether he served in the reserves or active military. It does not contradict his later statement that he served 'in Vietnam.'" Though Keller conceded that video of the March 2008 speech "were being circulated by a number of people in politics, including McMahon's campaign," he wrote, "we did not rely on that material. Instead, we obtained a DVD of the full Blumenthal speech from a source not connected with the McMahon campaign, and reviewed the entire event and made sure it hadn't been unfairly spliced, edited or doctored."

Media Matters has previously noted numerous problems with the initial Times article (and its lack of critical coverage of Republican Linda McMahon, who admitted her campaign provided the Times with research on Blumenthal).

But this reported admission by Keller that the Times had the full copy of the speech and didn't mention anywhere in the original article that Blumenthal had described his service differently earlier in the speech is the type of ethical failure that puts a serious dent in the Times' credibility.

Indeed, the story is now about the Times' coverage -- and the Times has nobody to blame but themselves.

M.C.L Comment: Um Bill Maher, Chris Matthews and everyone who jumped aboard the NY Times train better start jumping off at the next stop.. This was the same news paper during the run up to the Iraq war were using Bush white house officials as sources.