RIGHT ON TIME – AT 11:35 A.M. ET:   Does it ever fail?  Whenever a Republican rises to prominence, or threatens to, The New York Times runs a hit piece on him, or her.  (And the her was either Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann.)  And so The Times, having run hit pieces on Herman Cain and Rick Perry, now turns to Mitt Romney. 

This is the same paper, located a subway ride away from Columbia University, that apparently couldn't afford to send a reporter uptown in 2008 to find out why nobody at Columbia remembered Barack Obama, who graduated from the place in 1983.   This is the same paper that did no investigative vetting of Obama, setting the standard for one of the most disgraceful episodes in modern journalistic history.

But it has plenty to say about Romney:

By the green-hued yardsticks of Wall Street, the 1990s buyout of an Illinois medical company by Mitt Romney's private equity firm was a spectacular success.

Romney's company, Bain Capital, sent in a team of 10 turnaround experts from Boston to ferret out waste, motivate executives and study untapped markets.

By the time the Harvard MBA's from Bain were finished, sales at the medical company, Dade International, had more than doubled. The business acquired two of its rivals. And Romney's firm collected $242 million, a return eight times its investment.

But an examination of the Dade deal shows the unintended human costs and messy financial consequences behind the brand of capitalism that Romney practiced for 15 years.

At Bain Capital's direction, Dade quadrupled the money it owed creditors and vendors. It took steps that propelled the business toward bankruptcy. And, in waves of layoffs, it cut loose 1,700 workers in the United States.

Romney's career at Bain Capital, which he owned and ran as chief executive, is a cornerstone of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination -- a credential, he argues, that showcases the management skills and business acumen America needs to revive a stalled economy. Creating jobs, Romney said, is exactly what he knows how to do.

The White House, though, is already preparing a less flattering portrayal, trying to frame Romney's record at Bain as evidence that he would pursue slash and burn economics and that his business career thrived by enriching the elite at the expense of the working class.

COMMENT:  Should investigative reports like this be done?  Of course.  I have no problem with a serious probe into the background of any presidential candidate.  But each Times piece on a Republican candidate comes out negative.  And in 2008 The Times tried to destroy John McCain with an ultimately false story about an alleged affair McCain had. 

I would certainly like to know more about Mitt Romney's business career.  But I would have also liked to know more about Barack Obama, either from The Times or from some other source.  Even today we know so little about Obama.  Some 450 members of the Columbia class of 1983, Obama's class, were surveyed, and no one remembered him.  He still refuses to release his academic records.   And Percy Sutton, the late, respected African-American borough president of Manhattan, said in the last years of his life that he had known Obama in Obama's youth, and knew that his education at the Harvard Law School was paid for by an Islamic supremacist.  The press buried the story, which never even appeared in Sutton's obituary.

The double standard is one of the factors destroying the credibility of American journalism.  And yet, no one learns, no one changes.  You'd think mainstream news organs would try to improve their product to compete with the new media dominating the internet.  But fear of crossing the political powers-that-be is apparently too strong in our major newsrooms.  The disservice continues.

November 13, 2011