Reading what’s deliberately left out of the New York Times
In the days of the Soviet Union, Kremlinologists read Pravda to see what was not in it. Who was missing from a photograph of Politburo members? Who failed to show up at a May Day or November 7 parade of arms through Red Square? What was not said about an expected great agricultural or manufacturing achievement? These could signal the sickness or fall from grace of a formerly major Soviet leader, or perhaps, in the case of agriculture, a famine-threatening shortfall in wheat production. Reading Pravda to get to the truth was often precisely an exercise in reading what did not appear in Pravda.
We have had many such moments reading the New York Times over the past several years. Our most recent notice of this was a tiny episode in which the Times failed to take its usual cheap shot at VP Cheney when mentioning Halliburton, in the case of no-bid contracts in New Orleans. Not mentioning Cheney allowed the Times to not mention, in parallel, the head of The Shaw Group, one of the two largest recipients of such contracts. In the Times article, a hit piece on Joseph Allbaugh and Bush cronyism, it would have been inconsistent with the story line to highlight that the head of The Shaw Group was, until that very week, the head of the Louisiana Democratic party. Small beer, as these things go.
More significant is the omission we noticed today via Stephen Hayes’ Weekly Standard article about the Joe Wilson affair. Hayes points to a July NYT piece that lays out in the first paragraph its underlying rationale for administration actions: “whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa.” The Times then ignores this central point in what follows (we are happy to email the text of the NYT story to anyone interested in reading it in its entirety). Hayes:
ON JULY 22, 2005, the New York Times published a lengthy, front-page article detailing the work of two senior Bush administration officials, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, on the Niger-uranium story. A seemingly exhaustive timeline ran alongside the piece. In 19 bullet points, the Times provided its readers in considerable detail with what it regarded as the highlights of the story. The timeline traces events from the initial request for more information on the alleged Iraqi inquiries in Africa to Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger; from the now-famous “16 words” in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union to the details of White House telephone logs; from Bush administration claims that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak to the naming of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and on from there to the dates that White House officials testified before the grand jury.
As I say, seemingly exhaustive. But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false.
This is not a minor detail. The Senate report, which served as the source for much of the chronology in this article, is the definitive study of the events leading up to the compromising of Valerie Plame. The committee staff, both Democrats and Republicans, read all of the intelligence. They saw all of the documents. They interviewed all of the characters. And every member of the committee from both parties signed the report.
It does not fit the Times’ story line about the perfidy of the Bush administration to point out that virtually everything that Wilson said was false, and was shown to be false in a bi-partisan review. There is quite a difference between “smearing” and “defending against false allegations,” but “smearing” better fits the story line, doesn’t it?
Epilogue
This space has spent a fair amount number of hours chronicling the decline of the New York Times both as a newspaper and as a business — see the index on the right for many examples. Its fall from number one to number three in its home market, losing 26% of its circulation (and still falling). Its following in the well-worn paths of decline of other business giants like US Steel, General Motors, and AT&T, companies that were unable to free themselves from their cultures of arrogant superiority. Its layoffs, lowered profitability, diminished credit ratings, and plummeting share price. Its ceding of the title newspaper of record to the Washington Post, as we and Jay Rosen have said. Perhaps saddest of all, and certainly most ironic, is that today a reader often has to read between the lines in the New York Times to get the whole story. Often, “all the news that’s fit to print” is not complete without knowing what has been deliberately left unprinted. (HT: Powerline)