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Times Watch for
July 21, 2003
Anti-Israel
Terrorism Would Have Been OK?
“Palestinians in Nablus Fed Up With Crime Posing as Jihad,” James Bennet’s Saturday story from the West Bank on rising crime in Palestinian towns, opens with an assumption that not all violence is equally bad. Describing three common criminals, he writes: “They were not masked men battling for the Palestinian national cause, just three thugs trying to kidnap a man off the street, apparently for ransom. In town for a wedding, Amneh Mansour Abu Hijleh, 36, happened to be out for an evening walk and passed by just as one of the masked men shot into the air. The first bullet hit her in the head at close range.” Would Bennet have thought better of the men if they’d been terrorists who’d shot and killed an Israeli civilian?
For the rest of Bennet’s story, click here.
• James Bennet | Crime | Israel | Palestinians | Terrorism
Still
No Liberal Labeling In Drug Coverage
The labeling bias in Monday’s front-page story by Robert Pear on the unexpectedly tough road ahead for a Medicare prescription drug bill isn’t as intense as it’s been in previous Pear stories, but it persists.
The very liberal group Families USA, which favors Canadian-style socialized medicine, is simply called a “consumer group,” whereas the other side is given an ideological label: “Conservatives agree that the Senate subsidies are generous -- too generous, they say. The Senate bill provides ‘too much of a subsidy to too many people,’ said Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania.”
For the rest of Pear’s story on the Congressional squabbling over Medicare drug coverage, click here.
• Drugs | Labeling Bias | Medicare | Robert Pear
Fall
of Communism Also Bad for Fish Eggs
Jeffrey Gettleman’s Sunday story, “Humble Paddlefish Fulfills Southerner’s Caviar Dreams,” is the kind of folksy, slightly patronizing tale the recently resigned Rick Bragg would have excelled at: A Southern success story on the marketing of an odd-looking fish as a source of caviar.
Gettleman’s story opens: “While caviar might go with canapés, it does not usually go with y'all. But tell that to Lewis Shuckman. A plucky, compact vendor of fish, Mr. Shuckman spent years peddling southern paddlefish roe from his seafood shop in Louisville, knocking on doors of fancy restaurants and country clubs, asking anyone who would listen, ‘Y'all want some caviar?’”
The Southern-based paddlefish would seem unlikely to elicit pro-Communist commentary. Yet a former prime source for high-class caviar is the Caspian Sea, which leads Gettleman to write: “Caviar Emptor, a sturgeon advocacy organization, said beluga sturgeon numbers had decreased by 90 percent in the past 20 years. Many people blame increased pollution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, which once tightly regulated caviar production.”
First it was polar bears, now it’s beluga sturgeon: Animal-world victims of the fall of Communism keep growing at the paper of record.
For the rest of Gettleman’s analysis of caviar and Communism, click here.
Bush’s
Deficits Are Bad -- And So Is His Lack of Spending
Paul Krugman thinks Bush’s deficits are awful and yet another sign of administration corruption--but Nicholas Kristof, his partner in columnizing on Tuesdays and Fridays, would like them to rise even higher.
Kristof has been vacationing in his hometown of Yamhill, Ore., and returns with a Saturday dispatch, “Going Home to Red Ink and Blues.” Kristof writes: “President Bush is not primarily to blame for this fiscal crisis. The causes include overly enthusiastic spending during the boom years as well as the popping of the tech bubble. But Mr. Bush is making things worse with his fiscal recklessness and his practice of forcing states and school districts to spend money on new programs without helping to pay the bill. Washington should be lending a hand, not adding to the local burden -- showing all the compassion of Marie Antoinette. If the budget crisis persists, and it is likely to so long as Washington is distracted and unhelpful, towns like Yamhill will lose some of their heart and vitality.”
One Times columnist excoriates Bush for a rising deficit, while the other excoriates Bush for not spending enough. Bush can’t win -- and if it’s up to the Times opinion page, he won’t.
For the rest of Kristof’s column on Oregon’s budget woes, click here.
The Times has taken heat from some left-wingers for being insufficiently aggressive in pursuit of the Bush uranium story. But Sunday’s Week in Review piece by Christopher Marquis, “How Powerful Can 16 Words Be?” more than makes up for any perceived past inadequacies, hyping Bush’s 16 State of the Union address words on Saddam’s pursuit of uranium into a Watergate-style scandal.
Marquis claims: “Today, those 16 words haunt the administration. They are the best-remembered flourish in a portrait of Iraq that today seems unrecognizable. They are a leading rationale for a war that has resulted in the death of 224 Americans. And they are either unsubstantiated or based on a lie.”
He quotes a figure sympathetic to that view: “‘We did not go to war because of mustard gas or Scuds,’ said Joseph Cirincione, senior analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ‘We went to war because President Bush told the nation that Saddam had, or might already have, a nuclear bomb, and we could not afford to wait. Now it's obvious that's not true and there was no solid evidence it was true at the time. Would we have gone to war if the president hadn't uttered those 16 words?’ he asked. ‘Clearly, the answer is yes.’ But, he added: ‘We wouldn't have gone to war without the nuclear threat. The president's case for war was centered on the nuclear threat.’ Administration officials counter that they went to war for a host of reasons. Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that the president's warning about nuclear weapons was part of ‘a very broad case’ against Iraq.”
Marquis leaves it as a “he said, she said” affair between Cirincione and Rice, without noting Bush has never said Iraq currently has nuclear weapons, only that Saddam was trying to acquire them, a point on which most intelligence analysts, and certain former Democratic presidents, agree.
Blogger Tom Maguire asks, “Why did Mr. Marquis of the Times not get a correcting quote from and Administration official, or simply note his own inability to find such a statement attributable to President Bush?”
Reporter Marquis continues: “By backing down from its most explosive claim, the administration has cast a cloud over its intelligence capabilities at a time it is seeking international support." An explosive claim? Months passed before Bush’s 16 words in the January 28 State of the Union registered on the media radar -- hardly “explosive.”
Marquis seems to suggest that if Bush’s “Saddam’s seeking uranium in Africa claim” doesn’t hold up, then Bush’s idea Hussein was seeking nuclear capability was also bogus. But one doesn’t necessarily follow the other -- even Bill Clinton warned Saddam was trying to get nuclear weapons.
Marquis concludes his misleading story with a quote from Christopher Patten, the European Union's commissioner for external relations: “It's hugely important that people aren't in a position to say, last time you cried wolf, why are we to believe you this time?" Marquis doesn’t mention Patten’s anti-war stance.
For the rest of Christopher Marquis’ story on President Bush’s “16 words,” click here.
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org