Today’s New York Times includes a story by Elizabeth Bumiller, titled “As the Commander in Chief Deliberates, Frustration Builds Within the Ranks.” It is a so-called Military Memo and as the title suggests, it is filled with quotes from Bumiller’s sources who aren’t too happy with the Obama administration’s deliberations over strategy in Afghanistan.

The headline of the piece clearly suggests that the frustration is within the active duty military. Bumiller echoes that claim in this paragraph:

A number of active duty and retired senior officers say there is concern that the president is moving too slowly, is revisiting a war strategy he announced in March and is unduly influenced by political advisers in the Situation Room. [Emphasis added]

Both the headline and this paragraph struck me as very odd, as it is rare to see members of the active duty military publicly speak out against the President qua Commander in Chief. I was even more surprised, then, that Bumiller’s piece does not quote any active duty member of the military voicing “furstration” or “concern” about the Obama administration…or any other issues. No active duty members of the military are quoted. Bumiller’s sources include:

“Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer…”

“the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Thomas J. Tradewell Sr….”

“A retired general who served in Iraq…”

“[Defense Secretary Robert M.] Gates…”

“Andrew M. Exum, a former Army officer in Afghanistan, an adviser to General McChrystal and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security…”

“Michael O’Hanlon, a national security expert at the Brookings Institution.”

“A military policy analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing senior Pentagon leaders”

Note that none of these are active duty members of the military.  The “military policy analyst” is almost certainly someone from a think tank, or, at most, a civilian working at the Pentagon. With seven sources in her piece, Bumiller has failed to back up the headline and her claim that “active duty” officers think Obama is moving too slowly and is being overly influenced by political advisers.

The only possible exception is that she does refer to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s public disagreement about a reduction of the scale of the war in Afghanistan. But while McChrystal’s disagreement was public and widely reported, McChrystal did not say Obama was moving too slowly nor did he say he was being influenced by his political advisers. That is, Bumiller’s claim is not supported by McChrystal.

Reporting that active duty officers are speaking to the New York Times about their complaints of the President’s decision making timing and his choice of advisers is a big deal. It would be quite a controversy – one that Secretary Gates has already taken steps to avoid. But making the bold claim that this is happening and failing to back it up with even a single source — on the record or anonymous — is a bigger deal. Bumiller is telling a story she does not have sources to support. Conveniently, it’s one that fits into a common Beltway narrative fostered by the right that the military doesn’t trust Democrats. It’s sad that Bumiller has been given the space to do this, as it is an insult to the professionalism of the women and men of America’s military, generally, and the officer corps in particular.

Maureen Dowd, in a column on David Letterman and sexual harassment, drops this gem:

But we’re not in an ideal world. Otherwise, we’d already have health care for everyone and Glenn Beck wouldn’t have any influence over the White House.

Heh, indeedy.

This is as good as any coverage of the right wing’s attacks on ACORN as I have seen.

The editors of the New York Times have, as is their wont, again tasked Arts & Leisure reporter Alessandra Stanley to write about President Obama. She’s not very good at it, though, and has been eviscerated by bloggers (myself included) during her last two major endeavors to covering something that she simply does not have the aptitude to grasp: American politics.

The subject of Stanley’s assault was President Obama and his appearance on five Sunday news programs. Obama’s pitch was on health care, but Stanley’s primary area of coverage was the White House’s decision to not appear on Fox News. This bothered Stanley to no end and apparently, to her, signified that Obama had lost all control of his health care message and was blowing up in anger at Fox News. Where this is borne out by the President’s words on Sunday is never made clear, due entirely to the fact that Stanley is once again making shit up.

I don’t have much desire to go through and rebut the absurdity of all of Stanley’s piece. Doing so would likely require a five page long blog post. But to get a sense of how Stanley went after Obama, this paragraph is instructive. Prior to delving into her expose on the slight to Fox News, Stanley writes:

In each conversation, Mr. Obama proved what most people already know: he is a deft and appealing speaker who can stay on message. But there was nothing in those stagy interviews that shed light on whether his message would take hold.

On “stagy interviews”: Stanley believes that since all were conducted in the same room (which is normal) and all were on the same subject, healthcare, viz. Obama’s largest policy initiative, that they interviews were staged.  This is what the President does and frankly, it’s no different than the work of the original Full Ginsburg.

But more importantly, how in the world would the subject of any interview be able to reveal during the course of the interview the impact of their message on public opinion? Stanley is effectively complaining that Obama failed to predict specifically how public polling would shift as a result of his Sunday health care push while he was talking. To Stanley this is a shortcoming of Obama’s that fundamentally undercut the success of his media outreach. To the rest of the world, Obama merely obeyed the laws of space and time.

When Stanley turns her focus on the real story of Sunday — Obama’s choice to appear on Univision and not Fox News — she really turns on her charm. While recognizing that Fox News is a partisan Republican outlet (she calls it “the one outlet guaranteed to find fault”), she still insights that Obama was fundamentally flawed to not visit with them.

And that made his star turn look less like a media blitz than Medici vengeance — Fox did not broadcast Mr. Obama’s health care speech to Congress on Sept. 9, so Mr. Obama did not speak to “Fox News Sunday.”

I’m not quite sure what to do with the comparison between going on five but not a sixth Sunday talk shows and the sacking of Florence by an army that then uses mass murder as means of controlling the conquered city. Stanley has reached a level of absurdity so great that it resists mockery. It stands on its own in its idiocy; merely recognizing what is being said is sufficient for rejecting her assertion.

In the subsequent paragraph, Stanley returns to an authorial style she is much more familiar with: fiction.

That omission was not as tactical as it was telling: a rare sign of frustration, and payback, by a White House that prides itself on diplomacy and an even keel. Mr. Obama sought on Sunday to bring a little order and civility to a debate that grows ever more heated and shrill. But by boycotting, the White House seemed to be getting caught up in the kind of hostilities that increasingly divide Fox News Channel from its rivals.

Stanley doesn’t do it explicitly, but I can only assume that she thinks  that had Obama appeared on Fox, they would have treated him hostilely and brought up such subjects as ACORN, racism, and the NEA. This would have lead to Obama responding in a less than civil manner — though we’ve never seen the President do such a thing — and as a result, the “order” of the debate would have been diminished. But Stanley does an interesting thing: she claims the White House is guilty of exactly the same outcome by avoiding such a fight! Heads she wins, tails Obama loses!

It’s deeply disturbing that the editors of the Times have repeatedly chosen to rely on a reporter who has no knowledge or aptitude for political reporting to be a source of front-page content. There’s more to deal with in Stanley’s trite piece of speculative process reporting and I’m sure others will deal with it in greater deal. In the mean time, I think a Shorter summation of Stanley’s work is in order to save her from further Fisking on this blog.

Shorter Alessandra Stanley:

According to my friends at Fox News, Obama’s five show Sunday blitz was all about exacting revenge on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Update:

Just to get a better sense of the depth and breadth of the record of bad Alessandra Stanley pieces, both Gawker and NYTPicker have unique tags for documenting her errors and frequent corrections.

Via Charles Monaco.

There’s really no other way to describe Time Magazine’s cover story on Glenn Beck than just awful. The writing itself is horrendous, as is the quality of the reporting. For example of the former, see this paragraph:

Our hot summer of political combat is turning toward an autumn of showdowns over some of the biggest public-policy initiatives in decades. The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation — poured abundantly over Obama’s presidential campaign a year ago — have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness. Trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books. Good faith is trading at pennies on the dollar. The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style” — the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country — is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you’d think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

“The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation…” Good God, are you kidding me? Ana Marie Cox of Time’s Swampland blog tweets:

I respect the right of Time’s copy editors to unionize but this wildcat strike (only explanation for the Beck story) is poorly timed.

Indeed, that would be a charitable explanation for this drivel – the editors are on strike.

But throughout the piece, written by David Von Drehle, there is a supreme unwillingness to challenge Glenn Beck, teabag conspiracy theories, or basic lies told in the Beck narrative. Jay Rosen points out this begins in the first paragraph, as Von Drehle does a “he said, she said, who can know?” citation of the crowds of the 9/12 protest in DC.  While Von Drehle presents Beck as a cultural curiosity who’s getting rich while harnessing outrage that he is fueling, there is no accountability for the Beck’s fundamentally dangerous line of work. There is no adjudication of, to use the paragraph quoted above, the fact that while there are teabaggers shouting so loud congressional town hall discussions are being shut down and some of those teabaggers are bringing fire arms to town halls, there is no plan to create a civilian military corps subservient to Obama. That is, as is so often the case with Beltway journalism, one side makes a valid claim, the other makes shit up, and Von Drehle is helpless to say who is right.

Time should be embarrassed publishing this crap, but my guess is they’ll take the extra sales from Beck sycophants and call it a day.