NYT Scrubs Portion of Original Obama-Olympics Article

There doesn't appear to be any shame left at the "Grey Lady" when it comes to shilling for President Obama. The NYT did a major scrub of a largely unfavorable report from Copenhagen about President Obama's Olympic gambit. Then, they "deep-sixed" the original and posted a less "biting" edited version under the same URL as the older one.

NewsBusters reported:

The change in the dateline location is important to the point of this post. The Washington story is not an hours-later update of an older story; the location change means that it is a new story. Yet it carries the same URL as the older one out of Copenhagen (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/sports/03obama.html). There is no journalistically defensible reason for deleting the Copenhagen-based story. Yet it has indeed disappeared. Times searches on word strings deleted from the older item come up empty.

As if the Times needed any more blows to its allegedly still-existing journalistic integrity, this one can't help but beg the question of who at the White House put pressure on the Times to do what it did. Why would any journalist put themselves in the position of making people wonder if they bow to the wishes of the politically powerful? The answer may be that journalism, once thought to be at least lurking occasionally in its Manhattan hallways, is officially dead at the New York Times.

Here is a side by side comparison of the first five paragraphs. The original version is on the left.

British Press Reams Obama Over Failed Olympic Bid

The British Press said Obama was "humiliated" by his failed bid to use his "rock star" persona to win the 2016 hosting of the Olympic games for his home town of Chicago.

From TIMESONLINE:

It was only the Olympic Games, the White House will argue — not a high-stakes diplomatic gamble with North Korea. It is always worthwhile when Mr Obama sells America to the rest of the world, David Axelrod, his chief political adviser, said today. But that argument will fall on deaf ears in the US. Americans want their presidents to be winners.

Mr Obama was greeted — as usual — like a rock star by the IOC delegates in Copenhagen — then humiliated by them. Perception is reality. A narrow defeat for Chicago would have been acceptable — but the sheer scale of the defeat was a bombshell, and is a major blow for Mr Obama at a time when questions are being asked about his style of governance…

Watch Obama try to spin this into something other than a dismal failure.