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Times Watch for
September 30, 2004
Bush Admin Called Critics
"Unpatriotic"…
When, Exactly?
The Times editorializes Thursday on Tony Blair's speech to his party conference justifying British participation in the Iraq war. The Times holds up Blair as a model for Bush and spreads the "unpatriotic" canard: "At Brighton, Mr. Blair's official line about the false intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq was: 'I can apologize for the information that turned out to be wrong, but I can't, sincerely at least, apologize for removing Saddam.' That raises a lot of questions, but at least the words 'apologize' and 'wrong' were put on record, and his critics were not called unpatriotic."
The idea that Bush & Co. go around questioning the patriotism of anti-war critics has been put forward by Times editorial writers, columnists and reporters, but the paper has yet to back up those claims with actual quotes from Republicans. Times Watch would go so far as to suggest the allegation is "unsubstantiated."
For the rest of the Times on Blair's speech, click here.
• Tony Blair | Editorial | Iraq War | Patriotism
Lumping Toddlers with Rock-Throwing Teens
Greg Myre reports on violence in Israel over a headline portraying it as tit-for-tat, all victims equally innocent ("Children on Both Sides Killed on Northern Border of Gaza Strip). But while the Israeli victims were toddlers, two of the Palestinian "children" were 16- and 17-year-olds throwing stones at soldiers.
"Palestinian rocket attack killed two Israeli children, ages 2 and 4, and Israeli soldiers killed five Palestinians on Wednesday in bloodshed that claimed young lives on both sides of the Gaza Strip's northern border," Myre notes Thursday.
Later he mentions the Palestinian "children": "On Wednesday, Israeli soldiers clashed repeatedly with Palestinian gunmen and stone-throwing youths on the outskirts of the Jabaliya refugee camp, a leading source of the rocket fire, the military said. The Palestinian dead included three boys, ages 13, 16 and 17, who were among the stone throwers, Palestinian witnesses said. Two were killed in Jabaliya, and the third in a separate incident outside the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, farther to the south, Palestinian hospital officials said."
The Times headline lumps in toddlers with violent young men (two of them aged 16 and 17) throwing stones at Israeli soldiers -- not much younger than the average Palestinian suicide bomber.
For the rest of Myre's story on "children on both sides" in Israel, click here.
• Headlines | Israel | Greg Myre | Terrorism
Seymour Bias in the Book Section
Michiko Kakutani's review of left-wing muckraker Seymour Hersh's book, "Chain of Command -- The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib" reveals her take on the "conventional wisdom" of Iraq: "And much of his post-9/11 reporting -- which frequently provoked controversy and criticism when it first appeared -- has since come to be accepted as conventional wisdom: that intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (used by the Bush administration to sell Congress and the American public on the war) was selective, sensationalized or just plain wrong; that a group of conservative, utopian civilians dominated thinking about Iraq at the Pentagon; that the C.I.A. was a deeply troubled agency with a director, George J. Tenet, who would not last in the job; and that the Bush administration's war and postwar planning for Afghanistan and Iraq was seriously flawed….Mr. Hersh's work is necessary reading for anyone remotely interested in what went wrong and continues to go wrong in Iraq, and how the Bush administration came to take America to war there in the first place."
But despite all that, don't think Hersh is some kind of left-winger: "The outrage that stokes Mr. Hersh's writing, however, seems less like ideological or partisan outrage than an old-fashioned muckraker's outrage, fueled by the disparity he sees between the reality described by senior-level officials and spinmeisters, and the reality on the ground as observed by soldiers, lower-level bureaucrats, operational experts and by the reporter himself."
For the rest of Kakutani on Hersh, click here.
• Books | Seymour Hersh | Iraq War | Michiko Kakutani
Bush Still Looking for "Solid Lead" in Polls
In an interactive feature posted on the Times website, chief campaign correspondent Adam Nagourney
continues to pooh-pooh pro-Bush
polling data on the eve of the first presidential debate tonight: "First of all, most polls suggest that Bush has a lead, but not a large one and not a solid one. And there's so much sort of variation in polls these days, that I think no one is really quite sure what's going on out there."
• Campaign 2004 | Debates | Adam Nagourney | Polls
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org