A 60-word paragraph explaining why President Obama reportedly failed to appreciate anxieties over recent terrorist attacks disappeared Friday from a New York Times report, raising questions about the newspaper’s editorial judgment.
The now-deleted paragraph read, “In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments.”
“Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said,” it added.
The report, titled “Under Fire From G.O.P., Obama Defends Response to Terror Attacks,” detailed a private meeting between the president and columnists from various media groups.
The White House is scrambling now in the aftermath of two recent Islamic terrorist attacks to calm nerves and reassure Americans that administration has the threat under control. Terrorists launched several coordinated attacks on Paris in November, killing 130 and injuring dozens more. Two radicalized jihadis later shot and killed 14 people in a California-run facility for persons with mental disabilities.
The White House’s response to both attacks has been criticized as nonchalant and lacking urgency, and Obama is working now to address this unflattering image.
When the Times published its report online Thursday evening, the section about Obama and television did not go unnoticed, and it was noted with no small amount of surprise by both reporters and media commentators.
“This is breathtaking,” said National Journal’s Ron Fournier.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto added, “Imagine [former President George W. Bush] saying this.”
CNN’s senior media correspondent Brian Stelter said that passage was the “quote of the day.”
That entire section has since been removed, however, and the story carries no editors note or anything else to explain why the reference to Obama and television has disappeared.
A few have suggested that the Times removed the unflattering paragraph in response to a request from the angry White House.
Others floated the idea Friday morning that perhaps the president’s comment about television was said in jest, and that the Times didn’t realize this until after it had published the original report.
But none of these suggestions are true, the Times’ Washington bureau chief, Elisabeth Bumiller, told the Washington Examiner’s media desk.
“There’s nothing unusual here. That paragraph, near the bottom of the story, was trimmed for space in the print paper by a copy editor in New York late last night,” she said.
“But it was in our story on the web all day and read by many thousands of readers. Web stories without length constraints are routinely edited for print,” she added.
The original version of the report contained approximately 1,240 words. The updated, “trimmed” version contains approximately 1,377 words.
A spokeswoman for the Times did not respond when asked by the Examiner to explain the 137-word difference between the original and the “trimmed” versions of the story.
–
This story has been updated.
