Some people still seem perplexed at times about the abiding distrust conservatives harbor toward the mainstream media, an institution still heavily influenced by major newspapers such as the New York Times. Allow me a brief example of the problem.
Sunday's Seattle Times included a version of this story from the New York Times regarding certain legal matters for detainees at Guantanamo. I recall reading the story thinking, "you know, this doesn't sound like the actual legal system Congress approved for these guys."
Low and behold, the Gray Lady was wrong, as described by legal expert Andy McCarthy at the Corner. I disagree with McCarthy at times since his politics tend toward the idealistic at times, particularly on foreign affairs, but as far as a working understanding of law affecting the war on terror he's quite good.
In sum, he doesn't exactly describe a just modest error of journalistic oversight in the original article. I wouldn't guess the article is a blatant attempt to misrepresent the facts, but it certainly seems a case where selected facts and defense talking points were viewed in a way that fit someone's preconceived notion of what "rights" have supposedly been denied to such detainees (versus the reality that they're being treated with exceptional generosity under the historical norms for such enemies of the state captured outside the traditional battlefield).
Good people can and have argued about the specific legal rights granted to enemy combatants, but that doesn't excuse wildly incorrect reporting from what is supposed to be a leading American newspaper. Since such reporting influences other media outlets in their reporting on a complex yet emotional issue in a substantive way, one gets some understanding of why conservatives aren't quick to embrace the MSM in the current era.
Posted by Eric Earling at January 02, 2007 08:04 AM | Email ThisAre you sure you mean Andrew McCarthy? He strikes me as admirably hard-headed and realistic, at least on Iraq (which is where the idealists are doing the most damage these days).
"So, facing down his critics, the president insists we will stay and 'win.' The problem is: His vision of winning is a stable, democratic Iraq--something Americans would not have gone to war over in the first place. Sure, it is an outcome we should all devoutly wish to see some day. But it is not something we would have sent American troops to Iraq to die for, any more than we would send them, say, to Sudan--particularly when the case has never been made that either stability or democracy in the Middle East will make the United States safer."
Posted by: ScottM on January 2, 2007 08:06 AMMaybe you could link to the actual example instead of Nutfarm Central.
Posted by: jimg on January 2, 2007 08:35 AMDarling of the left and defended by his employer the NYT until it was no longer possible to do so after the Soviet Union fell in the 1980's. Meet the guy who is the grandfather of todays msm "journalist" and prototypical NYT "journalist:" Walter Duranty.
"In a June 24, 1931 article in the New York Times, Duranty gives his views of the Soviet actions in the countryside that eventually led to the famine in the Ukraine. He described those who opposed collectivization of farming as an "almost privileged class" that had been created by mistake by Lenin. He said that the same logic that led to the overthrow of the Czarist regime must inevitably lead to the destruction of these people who he numbered at 5,000,000. He compared Stalin's logic in the matter to that of the Biblical Prophet Samuel or Tamerlane. He said that these people had to be "liquidated or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass". Duranty claimed the Siberian labor camps were a means of giving individuals a chance to re-join soviet society but also said that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death.". Duranty, though describing the system as cruel, says he has "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He ends the article with the claim that brutal collectivization campaign which led to the famine was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of asian-minded masses in Soviet Union which only history could judge."
Posted by: JDH on January 2, 2007 09:15 AMhttp://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/story/6301712p-5495382c.html
Posted by: Huey on January 2, 2007 09:50 AMhttp://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2006/12/the_new_york_times_own_ratherg.html
The New York Times' own Rathergate
American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson Original Article
Posted By: magnante - 12/31/2006 2:52:24 PM Post Reply
Byron Calame, public editor of the New York Times, has laid out a carefully worded exposé of the utter breakdown of editorial standards at the New York Times. The fact that paper prominently published a falsehood is only the beginning of the problem. When the falsehood was exposed, two senior editors of the paper issued a defense of the article without bothering to check
Another example:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003526364
AP Again Challenged on Iraqi Source --
Continues to Stand By Reporting
CNN into the source controversy using the word "fester"
The one thing the MSM could do well, it has failed to do, provide facts and check facts. It promotes secular humanism and in communities of color, "leaders" aligned with its view of the world.
It's just that continuing to refer to them as 'mainstream' when they've always been so biased, and especially now since they are dying out - seems to unintentially marginalize all of the New mediums for information, such as this one.
Posted by: Jefferson Paine on January 2, 2007 11:33 AMhttp://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2007/01/vaporized-135b-in-news-stock-value.html
Vaporized: $13.5B in news stock value
In a dramatic repudiation of newspapers by investors, the shares of publicly held publishing stocks in the last two years lost nearly $13.5 billion in value, or 20.5% of their market capitalization.
To put this in perspective, the vaporized value is greater than the enterprise value of the Tribune Co. or the combined value of the McClatchy, New York Times and Media General publishing companies.
The vertiginous drop came at the same time the Dow Jones industrial average soared to an all-time high and other market indicators gained by healthy double-digit percentages.....
At any rate, I think in large part they weren't on MS's payroll or beholden to advertising money (though an editor or two quit for that stated reason) or whatever sinister motives one could posit. Like the MSM today, they were largely just lazy and accepted whatever they came across that fit their worldview, which was "Nothing is ever invented until Microsoft does it" and "Everything anyone else does is clearly inferior".
They were similarly arrogant. InfoWorld had a yearly readers' poll on what they thought the best products were, and for 5 years OS/2 topped the Best OS list. Finally, after the Great and Powerful NT came out, OS/2 won yet again, but they couldn't stand that. So they made noise about "ballot stuffing" by "OS/2 partisans" (never offering any real evidence of such, of course), threw the results out, and did their own "scientific" poll (which was quite biased by even a cursory review by a statistician, which I am) and, lo and behold, NT WON! What a surprise.
* The 1988 presidential campaign was kind of the first. After hearing for months how Dukakis had balanced the state budget, and seeing not a thing in the press as to whether or not it was really the case (it wasn't), we was instead treated to endless articles on what Quayle may or may not have done 20 years before.
Posted by: Frank Black on January 2, 2007 12:06 PMThe debacle in Iraq is the mainstream media's fault.
Illegal immigration is the mainstream media's fault.
And all the goodness our government is doing in our names is also the mainstream media's fault.
Thanks for being consistent, right-wing goofus kooks.
Posted by: Jim on January 2, 2007 02:14 PMDon't you remember doing that sometimes when you were nine years old, and you got caught doing something you weren't supposed to be doing?
Posted by: Marty on January 3, 2007 12:35 PM