WHERE IS DEEP THROAT WHEN YOU NEED HIM OR HER

[WebSpinner]

just reading about the six people employed by the irs, as well as lois learner, who were involved with harassing, or more, of the tea party and the fact that all of their emails about said subject have been lost due to computer crash thus cannot be turned over to the committee investigating. just amazing and bet no person gets even a slap on the wrist for all of this. sometimes feel very afraid of what is going on in dc these days.

 

[Eight Legger]

Pretty hard to believe that the federal government can't dig up emails from its employees from a server or something. No one in Congress should accept the excuse that a computer crash is preventing them from ever finding what they need to.

 

[Flucospider]

A situation that clearly demonstres the need for an unbiased press and not a bunch of fawning cheerleaders

 

[WebSpinner]

that is what is scary, if the press accepted, like they do today, whatever the prez or press secretary says as being the truth, watergate would have never been known or at least the full story. they are not doing their jobs, they are democrats, love this guy, the party, and would never ask a negative question or question his statements and that is not good for the country or the people. they would say i am wrong but it is so obvious. we need a strong, unbiased national press to make sure that things are being done right and we just do not have that and have not for some time.

 

[Eight Legger]

Spinner, I think the media has covered this issue pretty well. You don't have to look far to find plenty of coverage of it. Here are some examples of mainstream news organizations and their coverage of what you described:

CNN: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/06/16/irs-faces-volley-of-new-scrutiny/?hpt=hp_t4

Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/17/lawmakers-irs-knew-for-months-lost-lerner-emails-more-documents-missing/

Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/06/16/heres-how-the-irs-lost-emails-from-key-witness-lois-lerner/

NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/us/house-panels-looking-into-irss-claims-of-lost-emails.html?ref=us&_r=0

Reading those articles, I don't sense that any of them are particularly favorable toward Obama or the IRS officials involved here.

Now, if your point is that the media needs to have more watchdog reporters who are developing better sources and can get way ahead of a story like this, I would agree...But the reality is that newsrooms have been cut in half because advertising revenue is not there anymore, and the end result is a press that is mostly playing catch-up these days on big stories like these. Most national media outlets can make much higher margins reporting garbage news about Lindsay Lohan or Prince William than they can spending time, money and resources to employ enough reporters to hunt down important government news stories.

And sadly, I guarantee you that most of those garbage stories get a lot more page views than the important ones.

 

[WebSpinner]

news depts are money losers so understand some of that but they just do not care what this administraton does, will print a short story but that is it. look what they did when mcclain gave the nod to palin, hundreds of press descended on alaska to give her an anal exam while obama just floated along and we did not know him either. they just accepted the books he had written about himself and which we know now were a pack of untruths, lies according to the ghost writer who actually did the work. they just don't want to go after or investigate democrats, plain and simple. if this were a republican administration, they would be all over each one of these stories calling for special prosecutors and doing the investigation themselves, whether they had a budget or not. there is no doubt a huge double standard here. there should have never been a reason for a fox news to exist if the main stream press were fair and unbiased. sadly, most people only see cbs, nbc, abc and thus only one side of an issue. dan rather floating a lie story on bush during an election says it all.

 

[urfan1]

hate to see something like this, all it does is gets us pointing fingers everywhere. BTW, not an Sarbanes Oxley expert by any stretch but (my limited recollection) the mere loss of the emails in the private world could lead to all kinds of problems. Maybe some of our other legal types are more of an expert with SO than I am and can enlighten us all

 

[Eight Legger]

Spinner, no offense, but I think you are being rather irrational in your complaints. Anyone can make the "evidence" fit their own individual narrative, but the facts just don't support your claims that the media is en masse just giving Obama carte blanche to do whatever he wants without checking up on it.

You sound as if you have a chip on your shoulder and are taking things personally, looking for evidence that your side is being wronged and ignoring any evidence to the contrary, such as all the links I just posted above. Someone on the opposite side could do the same thing. I think if you take a step back from your emotional connection to this concept, you will find that things are not quite as terrible as you believe them to be.

With respect to national media, I would be one of the last ones to take up for most of it. But that said, the one thing all national media members want is to get a scoop. So what do they stand to gain by just sitting on potentially negative information about the president or his administration? I would argue: nothing. To get ahead in the game, you need to break stories. That's how you make a name for yourself. You don't do it by kissing anyone's ass, president or otherwise. I'm not really sure what you expect of the media that it hasn't already done many times over.

That said, I explained above why in general there is far less investigative reporting of any type taking place these days, and it just so happens that Obama has been the president during the last 6 years, which is when a significant amount of media downsizing has taken place. You may view that as the media playing cozy with him, but I do not. Plain and simple, the amount of media resources available to dig into things has been slashed by as much as half across the board in the past 6 or 7 years. So this is what you get regardless of which party controls the presidency, the Congress or anything else.

As to the issue you raised originally, I think it is complete bunk that someone in the IRS would claim that all those emails were "accidentally" erased, and I think the media coverage has mostly followed that same narrative. If the media truly were sticking up for Obama and rooting for him to succeed, you would have seen nothing about this whole issue. Instead, there has been a ton of coverage, mostly negative toward him and the agency.

 

[Anachnoid]

Can't they get them from the NSA? I thought Rose Mary Woods had retired.

 

[WebSpinner]

i have no side but out country and Eight, if you cannot see the difference in the press between a republican in office and a democrat, then you are not looking or listening. the rather story, the palin situation tell it all. just want our country to be served by an independent, unbiased press and it is just not there. recall a suvey of journalists done in either 1989 or 1990 and the hero by like 90% of those guys was che guevara, not kidding, fact. this has been going on forever but now they don't even try and hide it anymore.

 

[Anachnoid]

I listen to tin foil head Beck and big fat idiot and there is no difference who is in the White House. It's all about the Clinton's ,illegal border crossers, govt spending and the "uninformed" voters, you know like the ones who voted Cantor out last Tuesday. And oh yea, national healthcare aka obama'sscrotumcare.

 

[Eight Legger]

I don't have a side either, Spinner. I am indifferent about most politicians and hate the idea of tying myself to a party. I favor some policies that one side offers up and some that another does. But I think these days, you can find ample evidence to support any theory that you have. That's my point. That's why I hate partisan politics in general, because it's easier these days for someone to convince himself that he is right than it is to consider that the other side might occasionally be right, too ? or better yet, to try to compromise on things and find common ground.

You cited a couple examples that you are trying to expand to be reflective of all media everywhere, and that's just not fair nor accurate. Noid showed that you could easily argue the same thing in the other direction. The problem with the 24-hour news cycle is that every little thing can be blown up and rehashed over and over again and then used as "evidence" of something that it really isn't.

At the national level, I think there was much scrutiny of Bush and his decision to start a war that it later turned out was based on inaccurate information. Likewise, I think there has been much scrutiny of Obama and his failures with healthcare reform, this IRS mess, Benghazi, etc. I'm not sure how they differ, and I'm not sure what you expect of the media, short of tarring and feathering the guy in a public square because you personally don't like him.

 

[spider fan]

It is a load of rubbish that the IRS can not "find" the supposedly missing emails. Try telling the IRS if they request written support for your tax records that you have lost them.

 

[WebSpinner]

can only say that one news agency continues to investigate these issues while all others closed the books when obama or any other admin official said this or that. those people are believed and they quit, close up that investigation. they would not do that if the admin was republican, there is absolutely no debate over that. we will see which news organizations continue to search, ask, dig and who does not, pretty simple to follow. not to beat a dead horse but showed in a thread on here recently how the press always headlines a republican as out of touch, controversial, right wing, though a democrat, though he may have killed someone is just senator blutarsky or such. complete bias, again if you don't actually see this then your eyes are not open or you just do not get it. Eight, in addition, as you said only cited two examples where the mainstream press attempted to alter the voting of our nation but am not going to sit here and go over every example available but you can read yourself and again if you have not seen this, you are just not interested. know you are in the press and don't want to see it maybe.

This post was edited on 6/18 1:51 PM by WebSpinner

This post was edited on 6/18 4:32 PM by WebSpinner

 

[spider fan]

Agree - when the tape of Rosemary Woods in the Nixon administration had an 18.5 minute gap NBC,CBS,ABC were all over it. In this "missing email" saga with all the backups built into the system and lo and behold the emails are 'unobtainable" according to the IRS spokesperson NBC,CBS,ABC have remained uninterested and silent.

 

[Eight Legger]

Originally posted by WebSpinner:
can only say that one news agency continues to investigate these issues while all others closed the books when obama or any other admin official said this or that. those people are believed and they quit, close up that investigation. they would not do that if the admin was republican, there is absolutely no debate over that. we will see which news organizations continue to search, ask, dig and who does not, pretty simple to follow. not to beat a dead horse but showed in a thread on here recently how the press always headlines a republican as out of touch, controversial, right wing, though a democrat, though he may have killed someone is just senator blutarsky or such. complete bias, again if you don't actually see this then your eyes are not open or you just do not get it. Eight, in addition, as you said only cited two examples where the mainstream press attempted to alter the voting of our nation but am not going to sit here and go over every example available but you can read yourself and again if you have not seen this, you are just not interested. know you are in the press and don't want to see it maybe.

This post was edited on 6/18 1:51 PM by WebSpinner

This post was edited on 6/18 4:32 PM by WebSpinner

Listen to yourself. You cannot seriously believe this. You think ALL media is so far up the president's butt simply because he is a Democrat, yet if he were a Republican they would be ripping him constantly? It's just pure nonsense. For starters, as the links I posted show, plenty of "mainstream" media are questioning this IRS debacle -- and rightfully so! You sound incredibly paranoid that everyone is out to get Republicans. It's simply not so.

The point I made earlier, I would argue, is the most relevant as it pertains to the type of coverage I guess you would like to see -- that is, deep investigative reporting with anonymous sources that produces otherwise unknown information, a la Watergate. Well every reporter wants to get that kind of a scoop. And I can assure you that 99% do not care which party the president or any other official is with -- if you can get a scoop like that, you take it and don't ask questions. That's how you advance at that level.

But the problem is that to GET a scoop like that requires meaningful and often longlasting relationships with the kind of people who will trust you enough to give them to you. How do you think Watergate came about in the first place? It came about because Bob Woodward met "Deep Throat" a decade or so before the story broke. Woodward chatted with him randomly when he was still in the military, sought him out for advice after he became a reporter and developed that relationship over a period of years -- without ever knowing that this guy would eventually be his big break.

With the cutbacks and lack of financial resources these days, there are very few reporters who have the ability or, quite frankly, the time to develop those type of relationships. Consequently, the people who might leak certain info to them are less likely to do so because they haven't built trust with those reporters yet. So what we have is a press that is more reactive and less proactive. But it has nothing to do with party politics -- it simply has to do with the changing face of media.

You're free to cry wolf and think everyone is out to get "your" side, but you're living in a fantasy world if you actually believe that.

 

[WebSpinner]

NO, what i want to see is the press not accepting what they say as gospel and thus failing to pursuing these situations. know you were not around during watergate but if the press had done then what they do now, nothing would have happened. again, if i am not right on the money, fox news would not exist and would never have been needed. the mainstream press today spends more time criticizing fox news than it does following these situations. don't have to debate whether i am correct, just look, open your eyes. actually get some of bernard goldberg's books and read them, former cbs news guy, really opened my eyes about reality.

This post was edited on 6/19 7:52 AM by WebSpinner