BY MARC MCDONALD
The Republicans are out in force this week, accusing The New York Times of treason over its recent SWIFT transactions story. Never mind that this story is nothing new, or that the GOP house organ, The Wall Street Journal, reported the same story. It doesn't matter. Hatred of the supposedly "liberal" Times always plays well with the knuckle-dragging, Rush-listening GOP base.
I believe that if The New York Times ever betrayed the American people, it actually occurred back in 2002, during the buildup to the Iraq War. That was when the Bush White House was furiously trying to convince the nation that Iraq posed a threat to Americans and had WMDs.
Instead of doing what a truly free and independent media should do (taking a hard look at Bush's claims to see if they were true), the Times did the worst possible thing. It pretended to investigate Bush's claims and then ultimately gave its blessing to Bush's case for war. The only problem, of course, is that the Times was actually using the same unreliable and false sources that the Bush team was relying on.
Indeed, the likes of the now-discredited Ahmed Chalabi enjoyed warm and cozy ties with the NeoCons behind the Project for the New American Century, including Paul Wolfowitz. Instead of embracing the unreliable Chalabi as a primary source for its stories, the Times should have done what any high school journalist is taught on the first day of class: doublecheck all your sources.
If The New York Times had been properly doing its job, then Bush's case for war would have been exposed for the pack of lies that it was. Maybe, just maybe, the U.S. could have been spared the horrific, ongoing nightmare that the war has become.
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6 comments:
I didn't see the Repukes complaining about the NY Times very much back in the early 90s when the Times broke the Whitewater story in a multipart series. I wish they'd put that kind of investigative firepower behind looking into Bush's case for war (or other stories that they ignored, such as the Downing Street Memo).
Oh phoo...the Bush Regime is just trying to save face. The NYT sat on this story for a year before they finally decided to publish is. We're only about five months away from election day, but of course Bush's righteous indignation couldn't have anything to do with that. Or could it?
Rove’s evil “genius” is based on his understanding and manipulation of conservative voters illogical and irrational thinking. Have enough Americans recognized this fact to avert future disasters by shunning the rabid right’s mob mentality, or will hate and insanity seal our fate as a nation?
One way or another, the November election will decide our fate.
Me? I gave up on the New York Times when they started running Rush Limbaugh's columns. I found it strange how he never mentioned this fact on his radio show. As far as I'm concerned, the Times betrayal of Americans is when it embraced a pro-globalist, anti-union, anti-worker, corporate "free" trade agenda back in the '80s. These days, you're as likely to read a pro-union story in the Times as you are in The Wall Street Journal.
Britain's "Guardian" newspaper is about the only trustworthy newspaper left in the English-speaking world these days. It's also the only major non-profit newspaper around. Coincidence? I think not.
Ignorance is dangerous.
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