Google averages a meeting with the White House every week
fortune.com
fortune.com
There needs to be a name for this kind of thing, where two facts are stated but the whole point of the article is an unspoken accusation implied by those two facts.
#1: Google met with Obama a lot, #2: Google has faced a lot of regulatory scrutiny over the last few years. #3: ?
Obviously the implication is that Google and or the president were engaged in some sort of shady shenanigans, but the article never really comes out and says it. It's more like it just dumps some facts out there without context, shrugs its shoulders, and says, "could be coincidence...OR IS IT?!?".
I guess it counts as FUD but I associate that term with marketing. There must be a journalism-specific term for it.
Google spends the most on lobbying in Washington these days, more than any other company. It's true that it's hard to draw a direct line between money spent on lobbying and results, or on number of meetings in the white house and results. But it is still worth reporting on.
The amount of money that large corporations spend on politics, and the amount of influence they have, is very large in the US. And Google is now at the forefront there. That's important for the public to know.
Lazy journalism?
It lists a bunch of meetings that coincided with significant events in the FTC investigation, underlining a supposed connection between the two, then proceeds to mention the fact that the logs for each of these meetings (and sources that were in the meetings) say they had nothing to do with the FTC investigation (and involved people that couldn't influence the FTC investigation) and did have a lot to do with other things going on at the time, changes in STEM, patent reform, healthcare.gov, etc.
Second, I think it's incredibly shameful to be so damned misleading as the WSJ was with their reporting. While I'm all for calling into question whether the number of visits Google has to the Whitehouse is appropriate or not, I think it's worth considering context and purpose of the visits when looking at the raw numbers. Not actually looking any further into this seems to be either some of the most spotty journalism from a major publication, or a blatant lie of omission used to push a narrative.
“In 2012, Google arrived on the list of top-spending Washington, D.C., lobbyists—a list typically stalked exclusively by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, military contractors, and the petro-carbon leviathans. Google entered the rankings above military aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, with a total of $18.2 million spent in 2012 to Lockheed’s $15.3 million. Boeing, the military contractor that absorbed McDonnell Douglas in 1997, also came below Google, at $15.6 million spent, as did Northrop Grumman at $17.5 million.”