Who Doesn’t Question the Timing these Days?
A decision by editors not to play charges of a terrorism plot at Kennedy Airport on Page 1 last Sunday puzzled me and some readers — and angered others. Among the questions raised: Was the paper properly skeptical of officialdom, in this case the Bush administration? Was it too skeptical, just because it was the Bush administration? Was a political agenda at work?
The quick answers, if you don’t want to read any further: yes, yes, and yes.
I asked Marty Gottlieb, the weekend editor and the senior editor in the newsroom when the decision was made, and [managing editor John] Geddes, who made the call from home, for more detail about their thinking…
Gottlieb told me he was mindful of a history of orange alerts that came at politically convenient times and previous terror plots that wound up amounting to less than they first seemed. He mentioned the case of Jose Padilla, who was accused in 2002 of planning to detonate a radioactive bomb. Padilla’s arrest was announced by John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, in an unusual news conference via satellite from Moscow. After being held for years without charges, Padilla is now on trial in Miami, accused of conspiring to aid terrorists. A dirty bomb is no part of the case.
So, the editor thought the Bush administration was crying wolf about a war they honestly don’t believe is being waged against us and decided to downplay a terrorist plot to blow the largest airport on the East Coast sky-high.
But they’re not playing politics or anything.
Gottlieb trots out Padilla as an example. I’d like to offer a counter.
How about the Scooter Libby case?
I saw at least a half-dozen front-page articles about the trial and I’m darned sure there were more. Now, we know that the actual “crime” that triggered the investigation was the so-called “outing” of a supposedly covert agent of the CIA. Libby’s trial did not even mention the original offense that started the whole investigation at the express request of the prosecution. It was, to quote Gottlieb, “no part of the case”.
It was, however, front-page news.
I saw no skepticism in the Times reporting then. I did see a lot of front-page headlines, though.
By Gottlieb’s logic, the Libby story should have been relegated to page 30, where the JFK terrorism story ended up.
Here’s the thing. Whether the New York Times wants to admit it or not, we are in the middle of a war that’s been waged on us for the better part of three decades. there’s no question about this. The folks who have been waging the war have said so over and over and over again. they’ve said so in speeches, in recordings, in their country’s newspaper – anywhere they can get the word out to their followers around the world.
This terror plot, even though it was in the very early stages of planning, was worthy of important reporting if for no other reason than to report the fact that our authorities broke up the plot. They can let us decide is the plot was any sort of danger, or could have become one, or if the authorities did a good job.
That’s something the Times absolutely can not let us do, because it’s very likely that we’d decide that the Bush Administration is, despite its failings and foibles, doing a pretty darned good job of keeping the terrorists at bay. The Times can’t even begin to let us think that because it is directly invested in the narrative that the President is using terrorism as an excuse to cram fascism down our throats. They can’t let the actual facts get in the way of the five-year narrative.
The problem isn’t that the Times does shoddy journalism or that it’s completely lost its objectivity. It’s that the most prominent newspaper in America is on the other side of this war.
(via Hot Air)
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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., The Long War Here At Home
