The bias of The Chronicle-Herald, or, the job description of Canadian Press "Editor-in-Chief"

(UPDATE: Expanded since first posted. A chapter and part of the introduction from an over-long and long-overdue post which I'm far from finishing, in lieu of the rest of it. I'm afraid this can't be of much interest for a general readership, but it needs putting on the record.)

Obama and the 2009 NATO summit according to The Chronicle-Herald.

This was the solitary example offered by Scott White, the "Editor-in-Chief" of Canada's newswire monopoly, as proof that "virtually all" of the news in a little Chronicle-Herald Opinions page article of mine had "been reported", presumably by his Canadian Press or by the Associated Press in the United States, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian arrangement whereby an Upper Canadian outfit headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute a superior American product to its captive market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. They call it "Confederation".

Now, if you'll be good enough to bear with me, in my little op-ed I concerned myself with the coverage of Obama's first 100 days in The Chronicle-Herald specifically, which is why my very second sentence read, "If all a person knew of Barack Obama's first 100 days as president was what he read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency." In case that and the other references in the article weren't clear enough, I explained again in my reply to an accusatory e-mail from this Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly that "I read the paper every day. The paper I write for, The Chronicle-Herald. I know what it has reported on Obama and what it hasn't." And I was referring to points of scrutiny and skepticism, which is why the summation of my list in the article -- which I'd have thought was fairly obviously a list of points -- read, "Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Herald's Opinions section?" Again, if my little article wasn't clear enough, I continued in my reply to this man's e-mail, "Anyone who depended for their coverage of the Obama administration on that newspaper would have been oblivious to those points and many more."

Whereupon the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly carried right on declaring that "virtually all of the stories" I cited "have been reported", period, and I was pronounced "wrong" -- only this time it was in print on The Herald's Opinions page. Now, I've had published negative feedback since a few months after I started writing little letters to the editor. Most of it angry, much of it nasty, and some of it personal. And not only letters, but quite lot of 800-word op-eds, too. I've always appreciated that it came with the territory, and after I finished reading The Herald that morning, I shrugged and had a fried bologna sandwich. But this demands revisiting. I know The Chronicle-Herald and have been meaning for some time to document some part of its near-daily abuses, in what its "News Director" and editors choose to print, and at least as much in what they determine their readers needn't be exposed to. Those conspicuous omissions -- the "sins of omission", as Matt Drudge has called them. And so I might as well start from what is for me the beginning. I've made a thorough search of the very useful Herald Archive for the period of Obama's first 100 days, and this is what I've turned up.
I made the points among the many in my little op-ed that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to rally the allies to muster their troops for Afghanistan, coming away from the Continent with commitments for more of the accustomed noncombat tokens as opposed to fighting forces, which are after all what is called for in a shooting war and which he and his party had claimed such support would have been forthcoming -- that some mythical European cavalry would have ridden over the hill to save the day -- if only the president of the United States had been less cowboy and more Continental, i.e., if only George W. Bush had been replaced by a president exactly like Barack Obama. Then I asked rhetorically why these points and many more like them had to be made on the Opinions page of The Chronicle-Herald. But according to the very Editor-in-Chief of the national newswire monopoly, all of this had apparently been made quite clear in the coverage which I had somehow overlooked at the time, and particularly in a Canadian Press dispatch from a correspondent who'd been sent specially to Strasbourg in France to cover the summit. 

(UPDATE: Ah ha. I uncovered with some effort a Canadian Press dispatch from the conclusion of the said NATO summit, uncarried in The Chronicle-Herald per The Herald's Archive and picked up in papers few and far between per my latter-day testing for it elsewhere. That report to its credit -- and I do credit it, sincerely -- made and if I say so myself vindicated half of one of the twelve points listed in my op-ed, that Obama had failed in the object of his first NATO summit to wring combat troops out of "our European allies", although I didn't see where that fine reporting carried on to observe as I did that Obama and his lot had sworn for years that a president with a "D" appearing after his name would've had those Continentals fighting and bleeding for our Afghan cause. So there it is: the report was out there, somewhere, making half of one of my dozen points admirably, only not in the only newspaper I'd concerned myself with.)

And lo and behold, there was in fact a Canadian Press dispatch datelined Strasbourg, in the April 4, 2009 edition of The Chronicle-Herald, under the Herald headline of "NATO faces new challenge; Afghan law which curbs women's rights makes mission tough sell".

I read the CP report elsewhere, and in fact it did get around to the only practical business of the NATO summit -- in paragraphs 26 and 27. Paragraph 26: "Several European countries made a show of announcing more support for the Afghan mission on Friday, but the numbers were small." A fine bit of reporting, even if it did come at paragraph 26. Better late than never. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Paragraph 27: "Britain said it would add 'mid to high hundreds' to the 8,000 troops it has in Afghanistan. France promised more police trainers and civilian aid, and Belgium said it will add 65 soldiers and two more F-16 fighter jets." Another fine bit of reporting, even if it never did get around to that other point in my little op-ed, that Obama and his party had sworn Europe would put up and pitch in if only the president were less like Bush and more like Obama. But half is better than none. Only, that paragraph never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

Again, that entire passage of two paragraphs never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald. The Herald version was abridged to 564 words. Of course, the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly wouldn't have known that the dispatch of his man in Strasbourg hadn't made it in one piece to the readers of The Chronicle-Herald, and clearly he didn't heed the explanations in my article itself and in my reply to his e-mail, that I was referring to the coverage in The Chronicle-Herald specifically and that my concern was not so much stories covered as points made. But the Editor-in-Chief of Canada's newswire monopoly pronounced against some nobody contributor to the Opinions page of a Nova Scotia newspaper, by name and in print, and brandishing his fancy title and invoking his office, despite that the one bit of evidence he offered for his case never appeared in the newspaper in question, denying the plain meaning of that nobody's words, and despite that to this day, that nobody has declined out of professional courtesy and Christian decency to name him or his reporters in print, where more people than a few might actually read it.

Of course, there was more coverage of the NATO summit in The Chronicle-Herald than that Canadian Press dispatch. The Herald ran an Associated Press report datelined Strasbourg on everything you ever wanted to know about Anders Fogh Rasmussen, headlined "Dane chosen as new NATO boss". (NATO "boss"? Anyone who knew anything about the office of NATO secretary-general would never accuse him of being "boss" to very much more than his secretarial staff.) And The Herald devoted an entire news item to an AP report on the protests against the NATO summit, headlined "Police quell protesters' first try".

Finally the Herald Archive turned up an Associated Press story, also datelined Strasbourg and published on the same day as the aforementioned Canadian Press report, under the optimistic Herald headline, "Obama pitching for help today". In all the news sections of the Chronicle-Herald, in all the reports making any mention on the 2009 NATO summit, a single sentence in a single story was the closest The Herald came to reporting Obama's failure:

"But the European public has no stomach for more intense military involvement by their nations. So Obama is unlikely to get additional help in the way of either major combat troops or new deployments to the toughest areas of the fighting in southern and eastern Afghanistan." That's a good start at reporting, or at least it would have been. Beside the fact that this was not a report of what had been but a reporter's expectation of what would be, and was discountable as such -- Obama was still "pitching for help today", after all -- and beside the fact that the blame for Europe's resistance to throwing in with us was put on "the European public" -- acquitting Obama -- even that much was negated by the preceding paragraph, which was the most inexplicable Pollyanna-ism: "Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments at Saturday's 60th anniversary NATO summit. He can expect more civilian aid and small troop increases for training Afghan forces and providing security for upcoming elections." ("Obama seems likely to win fresh commitments"! Gimme an O! Gimme a B! ....)

And that was it. A single sentence in a single story, indicating only that Obama was "unlikely to get additional help", preceded by a preemptive acquittal of Obama for any shortcomings plus some cheerleading that Obama "seems likely to win fresh commitments" which gave precisely the contrary impression, under a Herald headline of "Obama pitching for help today" which gave no hint of Obama's imminent failure, and without recalling the claims of Obama and his party that it'd be different if only a man like Obama were in the White House. The question of combat troops for Afghanistan was the one and only story of any practical significance in the 2009 NATO summit. And this was the first NATO summit since the 9/11 attacks and the start of the Afghan mission at which the president of the United States was not George W. Bush. "NATO tells Obama 'no' on Afghanistan; New president, no 'change'" ought to have been the headline, the lead paragraph, and the bulk of the story.

Nowhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald was there any final report that NATO had told Obama "no", and nowhere in The Herald's news sections was the point in my op-ed made, that Obama and his party had sworn for at least half a decade that "our European allies" would have been wading into the melee with us, to spill their blood and treasure by our side, and fight and die for our cause in Afghanistan, but for that "cowboy" Bush and his "unilateralism" which was "alienating our allies" and all the rest. Now the Continentals had their very dream candidate for president of the United States, and still they declined to fight. The 2009 NATO summit was the final repudiation of six years of theorizing and politicking by Obama himself, his party, and indeed also the international press. Is is remarkable that all that didn't warrant a mention somewhere in the news sections of The Chronicle-Herald, and was left to me over on the Opinions page.

But it was worse than that. The Herald carried an Associated Press report at about this time, unrelated to the NATO summit, which mentioned a new allied commitment for Afghanistan and positively went out of its way to credit Obama personally for it: "Australia plans to add 450 soldiers, increasing its force to about 1,550, Prime Minister Rudd announced Wednesday, saying Obama persuaded him to increase the deployment during discussions last week." Now, Australia is of course not a NATO member nation, it's certainly not one of "our European allies", and in fact it and New Zealand were the lone Western nations to stand with America in Vietnam, so this is something apart from the NATO summit story, but here was the AP in The Chronicle-Herald crediting Obama personally with an allied commitment of 450 troops, while there was no corresponding report in that same paper of Obama's corresponding failure of persuasion with those European allies who were the foot-draggers, and the ones in need of persuasion according to Obama and his crowd themselves.

(That AP report included the only reference I could turn up in the Herald Archive over Obama's first 100 days to Britain's disappearing-ink commitment of 700 extra troops, promised at the NATO summit, to be withdrawn again after a few months. But Britain is America's greatest ally and foul-weather friend, whose support was so taken for granted that it was discounted when the president was named Bush, so that's also in a different category from what is meant by "our European allies".)
Indeed, the AP dispatch reported "the United States and other NATO countries now have some 70,000 soldiers in Afghanistan -- a record level." Anyone would think from reading that AP report that the Obama ally-rallying was going swimmingly. But how much of the increase to 70,000 came from those "other NATO countries"? So far from reporting Obama's failure, that AP dispatch in The Herald actually left just the contrary impression.

And it was worse than even that. Not one month before the NATO summit, The Chronicle-Herald reproduced an Associated Press report, albeit left to The Herald's Metropolitan edition, which referred to "President Barack Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency," and added to that bit of fantasy this bit of editorializing: "Biden said the Obama administration will be keen to engage NATO allies in global security discussions, marking a departure from the last eight years when Washington often was on a go-it-alone course that upset its European allies."

So The Chronicle-Herald was quite happy to report that it was "Obama's policy to bring more European allies on board to fight the Taliban-led insurgency", but when, a matter of weeks later, that was shown to be less "policy" than "fantasy" -- or if it was a "policy" then it was shown to be a failed one -- The Herald declined to make the point. And The Herald was happy to pass off as matter-of-fact newswire copy that it was the Bush administration's alleged "go-it-alone course that upset its European allies", but when, just weeks later, it was finally proved that those "European allies" hadn't been "upset" so much as unwilling and unable, and it turned out that supposed presidential "go-it-alone-ism" hadn't entered into it, The Herald again declined to make the point.

More indulgence and incompetence of the Canadian Press Washington bureau (and Chronicle-Herald)

(There aren't enough hours in the day for my duties as self-appointed watchdog of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, so this post will have to be a shorter one.)

Any parody I could come up with could hardly be any more caricaturish than the actual dispatches of Lee-Anne Goodman, the lone American correspondent of the lone Canadian newswire service. March 9, top story, national news, Halifax Chronicle-Herald: "Palin's family sought medical care in Canada; Gosh darnit: Ex-governor's claim about 1960s prompts scrutiny, ridicule."

By the time that dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau appeared in The Herald, it had long since been mooted thoroughly. The Associated Press had interviewed Sarah Palin's father for a report on the subject the day before, and explained everything: "There was no road out of there [Skagway, Alaska, where Palin lived at the time].... The ferry schedule was very erratic. ... The plane schedule was very erratic. ... We had no doctor in Skagway. ... We much preferred to use our facilities because my insurance didn't cover anything in Whitehorse. And even though they have socialized medicine, I still had to pay the bill, being an American citizen."

So the scandal was a faux-scandal and the story was a non-story, and had been demonstrated as such long before it got into print, in news and opinion outlets including the very Associated Press, which is sluiced through the Canadian Press under an absolutely typical Canadian scheme whereby the Upper Canadian monopoly headquartered in Toronto is granted exclusive rights to distribute the superior American product to its hostage market in the provincial hinterlands like Nova Scotia. But that AP report with the facts of the story from Palin's father never appeared in The Chronicle-Herald.

To print the Associated Press report would have been to repudiate not only the Canadian Press Washington bureau, but The Chronicle-Herald which promoted the CP story to the top of its national news and joined in on the sneering ("gosh darnit"), and whose editorial cartoonist rendered the junk as his latest anti-Palin cartoon the following day. The Canadian Press Washington bureau story was sustainable only in the absence of the facts. Palin had only related the anecdote to demonstrate her closeness to Canada, there was not the slightest hypocrisy in it, and to make a top-story scandal out of it necessitated an obliviousness to the facts, if not also a smugness, elite prejudice, and an inordinate and obsessive malice for Sarah Palin.

It's one of the features of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, documented here many times before, that it is typically familiar with only the leftist line on any given story, and quite oblivious to the other half of the story. So for instance, when the Left picks up on a hoax that a Palin rally attendee called out "Kill him" when the subject of Barack Obama was raised, the Canadian Press Washington bureau will credulously repeat that hoax, even seven months after it's been comprehensively debunked by the Secret Service. That's perfectly fine in a person who just doesn't much care to be confronted by conservatism, and a leftist does have the luxury in the 21st Century of passing her life without ever really being exposed to conservatism except as a caricature and object of scorn, while we conservatives are confronted by leftism when we go through our public schools and our universities, or every time we try to sign into our online e-mail accounts and are greeted with an unsolicited "In the News" box of selected "mainstream" headlines, or when we try to watch Comedy Central with its daily recitations of Democrat Party talking points delivered in the style of glib, too-cool-for-school, pop comics. But the obliviousness to the conservative side of the story does become a problem in a person who's elevated to the post of lone American correspondent for the lone Canadian newswire service, covering what is after all a profoundly conservative country.


The junk reporting on Sarah Palin came just four days after the latest Canadian Press Washington bureau effort in its service as defender of the president of the United States against unkindnesses. The March 5 dispatch was headlined in The Chronicle-Herald, "Senior Republican: Obama like The Joker." That "senior Republican" was some "finance director" of the Repulican National Committee whom I'd never heard of, and his supposed outrage was an internal RNC Powerpoint presentation which used the ubiquitous Obama-as-The-Joker photo.

That's news at the Washington bureau of the Canadian Press and in The Chronicle-Herald of Halifax, Nova Scotia, which counted the story as "World" news. But here is some of what was not counted as news -- a partial list of developments dominating American politics in the day or two before that report ran:

-Suspicion by even House Democrats that Obama's promise, and the Senate Democrats' assurance, that the Senate health-care bill would be "fixed" through budget reconciliation if it's passed as-is by the House, would become just another of Obama's broken promises, that he would simply sign the bill into law and declare victory, and the Senate Democrats would conveniently discover some compelling reason against reconciliation which somehow never occurred to them earlier.
-Suspicion that Obama's appointment of Scott Matheson to a federal appellate court was influenced by the fact that Matheson's brother Jim is a Democrat Congressman who voted "no" on the health-care bill in November, and who Obama was at that moment inviting to the White House to be persuaded to change his vote to "yes".
-The recalling of quotes by Candidate Obama and Senator Obama denouncing the sort of thing he's now proposing as president, to enact his health-care monstrosity against the will of the people by 50-percent-plus-one parliamentary device.
-Charlie Rangel, the Democrat Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, forced to surrender his chairmanship in light of Ethics Committee findings in its investigation of him for corruption; Democrat Congressman Pete Stark lasts just a day as replacement chairman, on account of his being a hateful, deranged radical, most recently famous for telling a conservative constituent at a town hall meeting that he wasn't "worth wasting the urine." (That incident also unreported in the CP and Herald.)
-Democrat Congressman Eric Massa announces his retirement after the Ethics Committee is informed of allegations he had "made unwanted advances toward a junior male staffer."
-Democrat Congressman Bill Delahunt becomes the lastest in a long parade of veteran Democrats announcing their retirement as of the end of this Congress, avoiding a re-election campaign in what promises to be a very unkind November for Democrats.

But none of that qualified as news at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald. Instead we were given a report scrutinizing some unknown finance director of the Republican National Committee for an internal committee Powerpoint presentation. All those serious stories, involving the governing party and government policies, in just the day or two before the Canadian Press Washington bureau passed them over for its unknown-Republican-functionary-calls-Obama-The-Joker story. The Eric Massa story exploded to a new order of magnitude on March 8 and was the biggest thing in American politics on the 8th and 9th, and has carried over into the 10th, but still the name "Eric Massa" appears nowhere in The Chronicle-Herald. The Massa story combines a Democrat sexual harassment scandal with Democrat allegations of abuse of power against fellow Democrats. And yet when some unknown back-bencher from the Republican minority opposition called out "You lie" during Obama's partisan, hectoring health-care address to a joint session of Congress, which was itself a gratuitous abuse of the office of president, The Herald ran half a dozen reports calling the powerless Republican nobody to task, one of them from the CP Washington bureau.

The dispatches of the Canadian Press Washington bureau ought to make the CP's "Editor-in-Chief" cringe. But he presides over a monopoly: there is no alternative newswire service in Canada, and the CP's network of client news outlets are a captive market that'll take what they're given. And the journalistic offenses of his Washington bureau only flatter the prejudices of a Toronto elite: all the junk reporting, all the scrutiny of the powerless and stroking of the powerful, all the conspicuous neglect of big stories and disproportionate elevation of trifles in their place, all the obliviousness to at least half the story -- the effect of it all is uniformly to scorn conservatives and congratulate leftists, so it must be very difficult indeed for any Toronto bigwig to see the problem in it. And anyway, if the Canadian Press truly were "serious about the news", it would never have posted a hysterically-partisan glorified gossip columnist to Washington as its sole American correspondent in the first place.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, here, here, and here.)

The revolt against "remaking the nation"

"No peace in health reform; Obama vows to continue despite Republicans," a Chronicle-Herald headline read. But President Obama's problem isn't the Republican Party so much as the American people: Not two days before that Associated Press report ran, a CNN poll was released showing just 25 percent of Americans supported the Democrats' health-care bills, to 73 percent who wanted Congress to either start from scratch or quit health-care altogether.

And when it comes to pass that a Republican unknown wins the special election for U.S. Senate in religiously-Democratic Massachusetts, to replace Ted Kennedy, no less, and after vowing daily to be the 41st vote to kill the Democrats' health-care bills, then it may well and truly be said that the American people do not want this "comprehensive health-care reform," which was the centrepiece of Obama's project to "remake the nation."

Obama's problem isn't "misinformation," or "the venal tone of the arguments against reform," as the Canadian Press reported matter-of-factly in this newspaper. It isn't that "Republicans continue health care scare tactics," as the Herald headline on one Associated Press story had it. And the public outrage isn't "town hall nonsense," as another Herald headline editorialized on one of many contemptuous Canadian Press reports (like "U.S. racists direct hateful messages at Obama," painting the "teabagging protests" as crypto-racist) scrutinizing the powerless minority opposition, and the American people saying their piece in the town squares and town halls, instead of the unchecked president and his super-majorities.

Even after the health-care bills had been repudiated by Ted Kennedy's old voters, the Canadian Press in this paper persisted in describing them as "legislation that would have provided millions of Americans with health insurance," but surely if that was all there was to it, then the bills would have become law long since with wide margins and popular support. Obama's problem is that his "comprehensive health-care reform" is comprehensively abominable, and the people plain don't want it.

After the Massachusetts comeuppance, Obama himself briefly conceded, "some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge" that "if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making." So those "Republican scare tactics" weren't so "misinformed" after all.

The very "chief actuary" for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to report in December that the Senate bill would raise the price of health-care in America by $234 billion in ten years, that its supposed savings "may be unrealistic," and that there was "a very serious risk" of its proposed new insurance scheme becoming "unsustainable."

The health-care bills include something called the "individual mandate" -- a legal requirement to buy government-approved, comprehensive health insurance, enforceable by the IRS -- which is probably unconstitutional and certainly unpopular, and which Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing in the Democratic presidential primaries.

The bills are supposed to be paid for by something like $500 billion in new taxes over ten years, plus another $500 billion in cuts to Medicare. And the accounting of the bills is as fraudulent as Enron's. Over $200 billion in spending was moved out of the bills, to be passed separately in what is called the "doctor fix," so as not to be counted in the official Congressional Budget Office scorings of the bills, and ten years of tax increases and spending cuts are counted against six years of benefits.

The bills are as bad for what they don't do as for what they do. Nowhere in those 2,000-plus pages each do they institute the obvious, common-sense reforms like opening the health insurance companies to competition from out of state, enabling bare-bones insurance policies, or restraining the tort lawyers who make practicing medicine in America a legal hazard.

Not to mention that the "50 million uninsured" boil down to something closer to 15 million legitimate, hard cases, which could have been accommodated for a fraction of the $1.2 trillion that Obama and his Congress blew on their worse-than-useless stimulus and omnibus bills alone, without upsetting the system for the other 289 million Americans. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans in a September Gallup poll were satisfied with their health-care as-is, which makes a good start on explaining the resistance to any system-wide overhaul.

Democrats now propose to enact the 2,700-page Senate bill without putting it to a vote in the House, "deeming" it passed by "self-executing rule." It is absolutely without precedent for legislation of this scale, if not also an Article I, Section 7 violation of the Constitution. The understanding is that the monstrosity would then be "fixed" in the Senate by 50-percent-plus-one budget reconciliation, to circumvent the Senate's 60-percent threshold -- also without precedent for legislation of this scale. So to bring their Frankenstein's monster to life, Obama and his Congress are perfectly prepared not only to spurn the express will of the American people, but also to suspend the legislative process of American democracy.

Fourteen months into this "Age of Obama," Obama and his Congress have been reduced to "remaking the nation" by arcane parliamentary maneuver. It's been apparent for the better part of a year now, outside the alternative universe of the elite, monopolistic newswires and newspapers: Obama and his Congress are in collapse, and the American people are in revolt.

Still more problems with the Canadian Press Washington bureau

The way Obama's Afghan policy is being reported, anyone might think this was September of 2008 rather than September '09, when Barack Obama was Candidate Obama rather than President Obama, and an observer and critic of U.S. war policy rather than the commander-in-chief who ordered it.

The Chronicle-Herald's top World News story for September 17 was from the Canadian Press Washington bureau and credulously headlined "Obama: U.S. needs clear strategy for Afghan mission."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "President Barack Obama said Thursday the U.S. has yet to decide on the best strategy for the ongoing conflict and won't send any more soldiers there until it does."

That is undoubtedly what Obama said in September. But he had said something else entirely just a month earlier, on August 17.

Obama, August 2009: "I announced a new, comprehensive strategy in March. ... This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war."

"Our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies."

"In the months since, we have begun to put this comprehensive strategy into action."

So Obama announced a new Afghan War "strategy", ordered 21,000 new troops to Afghanistan in aid of that strategy, and things got worse than they've yet been. Obama then pretended the current failing strategy wasn't his and that he'd never order troops into battle without a proper plan, and hoped no-one would notice. And sure enough, no-one at the Canadian Press Washington bureau or The Chronicle-Herald did notice.

The Canadian Press Washington bureau repeated Obama's claims credulously, without so much as a hint that they were belied by Obama's own words of just weeks before, on that "new strategy" of his, with its "clear mission" and "defined goals", and which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March.

Obama, September 2009, quoted in the Canadian Press: "'We have lacked as clear of a strategy and a mission as is necessary in order to meet our overriding objective, which is to dismantle and disrupt and destroy al-Qaida,' Obama said."

"'There is no immediate decision pending on resources, because one of the things I'm absolutely clear about is you have to get the strategy right and then make determinations about resources,' he said.

'You don't make determinations about sending young men and women into battle without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.'"

And this was fully half a year after Obama had proclaimed, "Today, I am announcing a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. This marks the conclusion of a careful policy review that I ordered as soon as I took office."

Lee-Anne Goodman: "The original goal of the mission - to seek out and destroy the forces behind the 9-11 attacks eight years ago - is all but a distant memory, thanks in part to the absence of a clear course of action, Obama suggested."

If that's the case, then who, pray tell, may be responsible for this "absence of a clear course of action," considering again that Obama was only the month before championing his "clear mission" and "defined goals" which had been "put into action" "in the months since" March?

The Canadian Press Washington bureau worked in two references to Obama's popularity -- in Canada.

Lee-Anne Goodman: "a president who remains wildly popular in Canada" and "a president who enjoys unprecedented popularity in Canada."

No doubt. But then, Canadians don't live under Obama's administration and Congress, and don't get a vote on them. So two unquantified assertions of Obama's great popularity in Canada, and not one mention of his standing in the only country where that matters. (In case you're wondering, it's not good. The September Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found Obama falling to 41% job approval among independents.)

The people cannot afford a press whose object is to flatter Obama and taunt his opponents, oblivious to his actual policies and their actual consequences, happily obliging of his political tricks, and enabling him to say and do as he pleases without the fear of being called to account to keep him honest.

The press is now colluding with Obama in his shrugging off of responsibility for his very war policy, pretending with him that his policies aren't his if they aren't working, and allowing him a license and blamelessness.

When it comes to the current president of the United States and his Congressional supermajorities, The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press aren't so much news outlets as a kind of support group for leftist elites -- an imaginary "world as it ought to be" according to leftist elites, where they play make-believe that the "good guys" can do no wrong and everything's OK.

Reality is at least beginning to intrude among some of the more serious on the Left. By September 22, the leftist Guardian newspaper in England was running an opinion piece headlined "Obama the impotent," and the leftist New Republic magazine in the States published an important piece titled "Job One: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink."

But reality was still safely at bay in The Chronicle-Herald and the Canadian Press. On that same day, the top of The Herald's World News read "Obama a talk show pro." Another dispatch of the Canadian Press Washington bureau, featuring a large color photo of Obama laughing it up with David Letterman. As even two of the most pro-Obama outlets in America and Britain were worrying aloud about Obama's collapse, The Herald and the CP were still running the most unserious, frivolous fluff as if the honeymoon had never ended, oblivious to the disaster gathering all around.

(The Canadian Press Washington bureau in that piece identified Fox News as "notoriously right-wing." Well, then, America must like its cable news "notoriously right-wing": As of September, Fox News was drawing nearly twice as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC combined. All 10 of the top 10 shows on cable news, and 13 of the top 15, were Fox News shows. Even FNC's 3 AM Eastern "Red Eye" drew more viewers than MSNBC's breakfast show. Fox News is "notorious" and "right-wing" to Canadian leftist elites; to the American people, it's the last outpost of the Fourth Estate in television news.)

Further down on that same September 22 World News page, The Herald did manage to scrutinize the president of the United States -- the last one -- and a now-canceled U.S. policy: "Study: CIA's harsh methods counterproductive," an Associated Press story on a "paper which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology."

On or about that same day, the same Associated Press which came up with the "neurobiological study" story put up a couple pieces allowing some of the bad news reality into its Obama coverage -- "SPIN METER: $2 trillion in health savings? Where?" and "Tough political realities quiet youth 'Obamamania'" -- but for some reason those never made it into The Chronicle-Herald.

Not Herald News section material, really. There's scarcely any less news to be had on the Opinions page, and there's a sight more honesty there.

(Much more on the Canadian Press Washington bureau here, here, and here.)