Creeping Raines-ism is back at the NYT. Blogger Rantingprofs compares two stories from Kirkuk – one in the Philadelphia Inquirer and one in the New York Times. The stories were filed within days of each other. Cori Dauber comments:
Not a single step taken by the US troops to facilitate security, stand up the police stations, get the place moving again, none of the innovations noted in the Inquirer’s article are mentioned by the Times. Did their reporter not see these things, not ask, or not think they were worth reporting? It’s unlikely all these things developed in the few days between the one article and the other. Compare the two articles side by side and ask yourself: which one seems like more balanced reporting, and which one leaves you feeling more informed about how things are going in Iraq?
And which one is more designed to undermine domestic support for the effort in Iraq?
LITTLE DARK CLOUD II: One of the tactics of some journalists these days seems simply to invent what the administration said before the Iraq war to discredit them today. We’ve seen the classic argument, insinuated in the New York Times news pages, that the Bush administration claimed that the Iraqi threat from WMDs was “imminent,” when the clear indication of every speech Bush gave was that we should act before the threat was imminent. Here’s another one. A day after Dana Milbank and Dana Priest spun the Kay report to say precisely what it didn’t, they came up with the following sentence:
[H]ours after Bush spoke, Kay provided a more mixed assessment of his finding. He said his team had turned up “no conclusive proof” that Iraq had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger, a controversial allegation made in Bush’s State of the Union address.
Now what was the claim in Bush’s State of the Union? The famous sixteen words are: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Not Niger – Africa, a critical distinction. And, in fact, Kay did come up with evidence of a uranium link from Africa to Saddam, with the subtle distinction that nothing was bought and the offer was unsolicited. Still, Priest’s and Milbank’s claim, as written, is false. Correction?
The Dish 