Bob's Links and Rants

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Tuesday, May 13, 2003

All The News That Fits the Agenda:
The World Socialist Web Site has a good article which makes two comparisons.

One is the difference between the reporting of the Washington Post and that of the NY Times Judith Miller regarding the search for WMD's in Iraq. As I ranted yesterday (scroll down to "Hans Blix said it would take four months"--my permalinks seem to be "bloggered" lately), the Post reports that the military team searching for WMD's is discouraged, unsuccessful, and about to be withdrawn altogether. They quote named sources from the military. Meanwhile, Miller continues to run articles based on unnamed sources about weapons destroyed just before the war (third hand from the unnamed military based on the hearsay of an Iraqi with a baseball cap who points at the sand a lot), and about "mobile weapons labs." The WSWS describes Miller's connections to neocon groups that pushed for a war in Iraq for ten years, and how her current reporting is clearly aimed at defending the Bush administration from criticism that the whole war was based on false pretenses (not working on this blog, obviously, but the major media are still downplaying the issue).

The other comparison made by the WSWS is between the hyperbolic response of the NY Times to the creative writing of junior reporter Jayson Blair (four pages of angst in Sunday's Times) and the obviously slanted writing of Miller, which was based on little or no direct evidence, yet has not resulted in any similar censure or firing by the Times.

I don't think I can explain it in much more detail without basically re-creating the WSWS article--if you're interested, just go read it!