garbage Posts

When I posted the Slate article last night I missed that the New York Times' From the Editor piece had been published

Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into iraq... It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.

In the last year we've become accustomed to reading newspaper apologies. The medium itself is shifting, in response to 24-hour cable news programs and innumerable news websites. The old newspapers themselves are less about detail and more about context. There's more of an editorial voice coming in and more attention to good writing and story-telling. Papers like the Times are becoming daily magazines. The pressures for good stories has led editors to overlook lapses in the work of star reporters like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller. This new era of apologies is a correction of sorts, and the major papers' reaffirmation of their strict accuracy standards perhaps signals a commitment to hold the line of newspaper transformation right here.

Perhaps. "From the Editors" doesn't feel honest to me. It's full of details and reads more like an combined "Corrections" piece for the last two years. By nitpicking on each error with such diligence, the message is that the mistakes have been one of details. "From the Editors" talk about the "critics of our coverage" in a way that makes it clear that this piece is a defense, not a mea culpa. The editor's unstated message is that anyone who would critique them is overly obsessed with details.

But we're not talking details. Most Americans have had their post-9/11 worldviews shaped by news organizations that had decided that critical thinking was unpatriotic. The Times coverage has actually been better than most. Watch the unsubstantiated hyped-up garbage that runs of most local TV news and you'll see scare-mongering continuing every night. Even as Americans slowly rethink this war and even as President Bush's polls drop, we can't undo that two major wars have been fought with faulty information.

The mainstream media still aren't asking the right questions, following up the details, asking critical questions or putting the news into larger context. At this point, the Bush Administration's national security credibility has been used up. There were no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, Saddam Hussein had no hand in 9/11, opposition iraqi "leader" (and Bush favorite) Ahmed Chalabi is not a trustworthy fellow. Add to that the mess that is the Afghanistan and iraq occupations. The U.S news media shouldn't publish anything coming from the offices of the Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, or Attorney General Ashcroft without collaborating evidence from at least three independent sources. The national news media needs more of apology than this if it's going to mollify the critics.

Update May 28:

Today's column by the New York Times' Paul Krugman, To Tell the Truth, also talks about how the news media protected President Bush and his administration's war claims from any serious questioning:

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness... But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?

I’m starting the process of putting my whole site onto MovableType, even the old static pages.

"My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"This choice quote comes from Greg Thielmann, an intelligence expert in the US State Department (now retired). In today's papers this Bush Administration insider has come right out and said that the White House "lied about Saddam threat".
    Meanwhile the happy-go-lucky Donald Rumsfeld has said the occupation is costing the US $3.9 billion per month (see sidebar) and General Tommy Franks predicts high troop levels will be needed "for the foreseeable future."