Judging by the sympathetic headline accompanying Ian Fisher’s story from Hebron, “A Sudden, Violent End For a Promising Youth,” one might think it was about a victim of the recent deadly bus bombing in Jerusalem. But the Times headline is actually referring to the bomber himself. The Times places Fisher’s Friday story on the bomber, Abdel Madi, at the top of page A10, with a photo of his mother holding a picture of him.

Another profile by Greg Myre of two Israeli victims of the bus attack runs lower on the page, without a photo. The violent ends of the “promising youth” destroyed by the bomber (five of whom were 27 years of age or younger) aren’t memorialized at all by the Times.

This moral equivalency between terror victims and terrorists extends to the photos topping Friday’s front-page. On the left, a woman mourns the death of her cousin in the bus bombing; on the right, Palestinians mourn over “nine draped bodies of people killed in an Israel helicopter raid on Wednesday.” Yet the Times picture caption doesn’t hint that the Israeli strike was directed at Hamas militants. Some innocent Palestinians were also killed in the strike.

For the rest of Ian Fisher’s suicide bomber story, click here.

That Nasty Mr. Rumsfeld

Craig Smith’s Friday story from Brussels, “NATO Agrees to US Proposals to Revamp Alliance, gets personal in a negative portrayal of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s visit to NATO.

“But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on his first visit to NATO headquarters since the Iraq war, then annoyed Europeans by effectively threatening to set up NATO headquarters elsewhere if Belgium did not rescind a law that has been used to accuse American officials of war crimes. ‘This law calls into serious question whether NATO can continue to hold meetings in Brussels,’ Mr. Rumsfeld said, adding that the alliance could easily meet elsewhere. ‘Tactless,’ is how one NATO diplomat described Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks at an evening news conference where the defense secretary said the United States would withhold financing for a new NATO headquarters building as long as the law, passed in the mid-1990's, remained on the books.”

Thankfully, the civilized ministers of NATO overlooked Rumsfeld’s crude antics: “Despite Mr. Rumsfeld's behavior, the NATO ministers managed to make striking progress on restructuring the alliance along the lines agreed to during a NATO summit meeting in Prague last year.”

By contrast, Vernon Loeb in the Washington Post manages to set out Rumsfeld’s criticisms without portraying the defense secretary as a bull in a china shop.

For the rest of Craig Smith’s story on Rumsfeld’s visit to NATO, click here.

Broder Blasts “Arrogant” Times

Veteran Washington Post columnist David Broder chides the New York Times in a June 11 column: “It was arrogant of Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. to move [Howell] Raines from editor of the editorial page, where he was a particularly acerbic critic of Republicans and conservatives, and put him in charge of the Times' news coverage.”

On the Other Hand…

“Howell Raines is a great American journalist.”--CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather on Larry King Live, June 12.

E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org