I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Obama’s “Transparency”
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James Taranto’s had this great recent anecdote in his “Best of the Web” column today:
Yesterday afternoon, we received an email from Victoria Hutter of National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Communication. The message consisted of a statement from NEA chairman Rocco Landesman intended “to clarify the issues concerning an August conference call in which an NEA employee participated,” and which we wrote about Monday.
Politico’s Ben Smith has posted the statement in full here; the gist of it is that the “NEA employee” acted without authorization in organizing the call, which was “not a means to promote any legislative agenda,” although the employee used some “language” that was “unfortunately, not appropriate.”
What we found peculiar about the statement, however, was its punctiliousness in referring to the NEA man involved. His name is Yosi Sergant, but you wouldn’t know it from the Landesman statement, which refers to him only as an “employee” (twice) and as “the former NEA Director of Communications” (three times). The statement also asserts: “This employee has been relieved of his duties as director of communications.”
Wow, Yosi Sergant must really be persona non grata at the NEA! Well, not exactly. We wrote back to Hutter, and the following email exchange–quoted in full–ensued:
Taranto: Thanks. What happened to “the former NEA Director of Communications”? I’ve read that he was reassigned, but what was he reassigned to?
Hutter: James: He remains in the communications office but that’s all the information I have. Thanks.
Taranto: This is very confusing. You are telling me he works in your office but you have no idea what he does or what his title is, other than that it is no longer director of communications?
We sent Hutter that last reply today at 11:13 a.m. ET, and at this writing we have not received an answer.
The day after his inauguration, President Obama said this:
The way to make government responsible is to hold it accountable. And the way to make government accountable is to make it transparent, so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they’re being made, and whether their interests are being well served.
Here’s how Obama-era “transparency” works in practice: A government agency is caught in a scandal. The chairman of the agency issues a statement blaming the scandal on an unnamed “employee,” who, the chairman asserts, “has been relieved of his duties.” The statement omits the fact that the offending employee still works for the same agency, in the same office, as he did before. When a journalist inquires about this, he is told by a colleague in that very same office–the communications office!–that she knows nothing about his new assignment.
It’s hard to imagine government being more evasive and opaque.