This is an interesting fact but I can't draw any conclusions from it without context, and neither can the author. It's only meaningful in relation to how often other individuals or groups meet with the president.<p>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.<p>#1: Google met with Obama a lot, #2: Google has faced a lot of regulatory scrutiny over the last few years. #3: ?<p>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?!?".<p>I guess it counts as FUD but I associate that term with marketing. There must be a journalism-specific term for it.
The original WSJ story feels like "we requested the visitor logs as part of our reporting, and there wasn't that much interesting in them, but we might as well write something about it."
Julian Assange told us about this last year.
<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...</a>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500970" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500970</a>