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| Iraq |
| Blackout of the Press |
| 2007-02-08 |
| Abu Omar al-Baghdadi made his grand entrance onto the jihadist stage on October 12, 2006, and since then he's delivered two very important speeches — the more recent one came out last week — and has taken credit for much of the spectacular outbreaks of violence in Iraq of late, yet he still can't get his name in print on the pages of the New York Times. Why are the editors and reporters of that paper not telling their readers anything about Iraq's top terrorist? Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is Al Qaeda's guy in Iraq, and nowadays, the Sunni insurgency is being whittled down to Al Qaeda's activity in Iraq. It's that simple, and he's that important. So why isn't the Times writing that? I think the answer has something to do with what seems, to my eyes, to be a determined campaign to keep the American people from knowing the nature of the enemy in Iraq because identifying this enemy as Al Qaeda casts the debate about the war in a whole different light. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #8 One thing I'd like to see on Rantburg is a way to link associated posts, vaguely similar to threaded messages on Google Groups. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-02-08 19:56 |
| #7 Interesting. The author of the article is a fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, and before that ran the research bureau of the Iraqi Nat'l Congress in Washington, DC. Interesting list of articles it looks like he wrote for the NY Sun, too. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-02-08 11:20 |
| #6 BTW, a nice timeline. Rantburg day-by-day reports sometimes lose the narrative. |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2007-02-08 11:12 |
| #5 As I recall, the American press at the time of the founding was about as yellow as "journalism" can get. Most of the broadsheets were put out by party partisans, with lionization of our guy and scandal about his opponent the order of the day. In France shortly thereafter they were printing pornographic cartoons of Marie Antoinette and those imagined to be her lovers. On the other hand, most people couldn't read, so the political responses of the nonvoting masses were formed by rumour and riot instead. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-02-08 10:30 |
| #4 Ummm... wx? The New York Times is what we'd have if we didn't have Freedom of the Press. Rantburg is Freedom of the Press. So's Instapundit, Pajamas Media, Kathy Kinsley, Bill Quick, Matt Welsh, Mickey Kaus, Charles Johnson, Christopher Johnson, Ken Lane, Tim Blair, James Lileks, Lucianne, and thousands of others. |
| Posted by: Fred 2007-02-08 09:58 |
| #3 Again, I ask: Did the founders have this in mind when they offered the freedom of the press ? I think not, and I am willing to live without freedom of the press if they insist on misleading the simple amongst us. While we're at it, let's put in a voters IQ test. |
| Posted by: wxjames 2007-02-08 09:48 |
| #2 "Why are the editors and reporters of that paper not telling their readers anything about Iraq's top terrorist?" Because the NYT is not in the business of reporting news; they are in the business of churning out leftist propaganda. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2007-02-08 09:31 |
| #1 He wants fizzling nukes? |
| Posted by: 3dc 2007-02-08 08:20 |