Keeping the Times Honest
That's the job of the New York Times' Public Editor, I guess. And the current holder of the job, Clark Hoyt, does seem to be on the lookout for bias and shoddy reporting. Only, he's looking in very strange places. In today's column, Hoyt suggests that the Times isn't taking a sufficiently oppositionist stance toward the war in Iraq. Seriously.
Hoyt's column is called "Seeing al Qaeda Around Every Corner." Its thesis is that the administration is pulling off a dirty trick by saying that we are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq, and the Times is falling for it. Hoyt writes:
As domestic support for the war in Iraq continues to melt away, President Bush and the United States military in Baghdad are increasingly pointing to a single villain on the battlefield: Al Qaeda.
More:
Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story.
Got that? The administration is blaming al Qaeda for violence in Iraq, to the "virtual exclusion of other sources;" al Qaeda is the "single villain." Hoyt doesn't seem to have done any research to bolster this claim. Instead, he cites an Associated Press story from exactly one month ago that, according to Hoyt, found "that although some 30 groups have claimed credit for attacks on United States and Iraqi government targets, press releases from the American military focus overwhelmingly on Al Qaeda."
I decided to test that claim by reviewing the press releases that the Multi-National Force has put out so far in July. There are a total of 87 press releases, which I thought would be a representative sample, as well as, obviously, an up to date one.
I found that only 29 of those 87 press releases mentioned al Qaeda at all; 58, or two-thirds, made no reference to that organization. Further, of those that attributed violent acts to some enemy of the U.S. and the Iraqi government, 37 mentioned persons other than al Qaeda; e.g., "insurgents," an "extremist group," an "IED cell," etc. So, far from focusing on al Qaeda to the "virtual exclusion" of other groups, 55% of the time, the military does not mention al Qaeda at all.
The factual statements on which the Times' Public Editor premised his entire analysis were simply false, and easily shown to be so. However, it appears that no one at the Times thought it was worth taking two hours (as I did) to review IOF press releases to see whether the Public Editor's assertions could withstand scrutiny. It's odd: they have a huge budget, while we have no budget at all and don't even do this for a living. Presumably everyone has gotten over being surprised by this seeming irony.
Hoyt also criticizes President Bush's recent speech to the Naval War College, on the ground that Bush mentioned al Qaeda 27 times. If Hoyt knows some reason why this is inappropriate, however, he kept it to himself. Bush did indeed talk about al Qaeda's important role in Iraq in that speech; here is an excerpt:
Al Qaeda is responsible for the most sensational killings in Iraq. *** Our commanders tell me that 80 to 90 percent of these suicide bombings are the work of foreign fighters, people who don't like the advance of an alternative to their ideology, and they come in and murder the innocent to achieve their objectives.
Hoyt doesn't mention this statistic; I get the feeling he doesn't believe it, but why? He doesn't say.
Hoyt has one more grievance:
[I]n using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.
Hoyt seems to be convinced that al Qaeda in Iraq (Mesopotamia) somehow doesn't count, and that the administration, or the military, is guilty of blurring the distinction between these allegedly unrelated entities.
Actually, though, the military has talked a lot about al Qaeda in Iraq. Of the 29 references to al Qaeda in the 87 press releases noted above, 13 referred specifically to "al Qaeda in Iraq" as opposed to "al Qaeda."
But why does Hoyt think this distinction is so important? Hoyt's claim that al Qaeda in Iraq is "an Iraqi group" is sensationally ignorant. It was founded by a Jordanian, Zarqawi, and is now headed by an Egyptian, al-Masri. While some members are presumably Iraqis, it consists mostly of the "foreign fighters" mentioned by President Bush who sneak across the border from Syria or Jordan. And, in any event, al Qaeda in Iraq has pledged its loyalty to the umbrella organization. Just last week, Zawahiri released a long video tape which I commented on here. The video is one long apologia for Zawahiri's favorite protege, al Qaeda in Iraq. Zawahiri exhorts radical Muslims to go to Iraq to carry out suicide bombings, and many, as the military's numbers indicate, do so. So why, exactly, is "al Qaeda in Iraq" irrelevant to "al Qaeda"? Hoyt doesn't try to frame a coherent argument, and anyone who understands anything about radical Islam will find the claim preposterous.
That the New York Times has become one of the nation's leading centers of know-nothingism is old news. There was a time, though, when the Public Editor at least worried about the paper's relentlessly left-wing bias. Under Clark Hoyt, that concern evidently has been supplanted by a suspicion that the Times may be too cozy with the Bush administration and the U.S. military. Hoyt notes that in recent weeks, "references to Al Qaeda began creeping in [to the paper's Iraq coverage] with greater frequency." That could be, of course, because in Operation Arrowhead Ripper and similar efforts, our troops are going after al Qaeda in Anbar, Diyala and elsewhere. But this obvious explanation apparently strikes Hoyt as sinister, and he seems determined to prevent any mention of al Qaeda from "creeping into" the paper's coverage of Iraq.
All of which apparently caused Times reporter Dean Baquet to respond to Hoyt with bemusement: “I think the paper’s coverage over all has been pretty skeptical of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.” No kidding! But, in Hoyt's view, not skeptical enough.
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