Bookworm has an excellent post about some very relevant stories the media chooses to ignore. Don’t just read her post, read the comments too. Her readers made some great observations.
I don’t know why I didn’t blog about the Charles Freeman story. Certainly it had all the perfect elements for yet another point of concern about the Obama administration: the Director of National Intelligence (!) selects Freeman, the Obama administration disclaims about knowledge of the selection, and Freeman turns out to be both a lunatic and a paid shill of the Saudi and Chinese governments. There’s a guy you want whispering in the President’s ear about the direction our foreign policy should go. The fact is, so many others were blogging about it, that I had nothing to add. (And speaking of others, here’s an excellent summary of the Freeman debacle and why it matters.)
Anyway, Freeman is just another in an almost uninterrupted line of stories about the Obama administration screwing up — yet again — when it comes to selecting someone to serve the administration. We’re getting used to the sordid tales of tax cheats and wackos. The more interesting story about Charles Freeman, I think, is that the New York Times refused to cover the story. (This, again, is something other bloggers have been pointing out with some consistency during the last three weeks). The Times, after all, calls itself the paper of record, and boasts that it prints all the news that’s fit to print. Apparently it did not deem Freeman newsworthy and the Times wanted no record of his existence.
Update: Michelle Malkin has a must read post about how ABC News was too lazy to read all the documents, but quick to declare they contained nothing but old news. Michelle did read the documents and points out how incredibly wrong ABC was:
It’s obvious that neither Tumulty nor ABC News read through the entire trove of documents. Instead, they rely on Judicial Watch’s press release — which included highlights, but obviously not all, of what was included in the FOIA request.
As I reported (yeah, we can do that, too, MSM), one of the most notable e-mail exchanges I found in the docs (which was not spotlighted in JW’s release, but could be found by anyone who actually clicked through on JW’s site to the actual records) dealt with Pelosi’s absurd demand in December 2008 (that’s just three months ago, not “early in her tenure”) that the military move her jet from San Francisco airport to Travis Air Force base (where she had “business” and where she just so happens to have a country home nearby in Napa 30 minutes away!) Queen Pelosi didn’t want to drive 1.5 hours. She demanded that the military come to her. DoD officials pointed out that this had never been done before — not even for the Defense Secretary.
Yet ABC News asserts that JW’s document release “doesn’t seem to prove the organization’s allegation that Pelosi has made ‘unprecedented demands’ for the flights.”
