All the news the government deems fit to print

Last month, the NY Times ran an article exposing the illegal NSA wiretapping program. Good for them--except that they'd known about it for A YEAR. (Whether they knew about it before the 2004 election still seems to be unclear.) This is bad; really bad. But it gets worse. Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution points out that, based on passages in Times' reporter James Risen's new book, State of War, the Times has been sitting on a lot of stories in the past few years. They sat on crucial information about the Downing Street Memo. They sat and continue to sit on reports that the CIA sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq (before the war) to ask them whether they were working on WMD programs, and every single relative reported back that the scientists said they weren't, and that Iraq had nothing.

Billmon refers to the NY Times as the "New Pravda." That seems harsh to me--to the old Pravda, that is. The Times published Judy Miller's hallucinations based on the BS fed her by Ahmed Chalabi, but didn't publish the evidence which suggested that Judy was all wrong. Over 2200 US service members have died, and countless others, because the state-run press in the US refuses to print the truth.

Jonathan has much more on this--I just summarized his post.