The assertions that I made in my last comment post are not opinion, or debatable claims; they are factual.

No one – War supporter, war opponent, Republican, Democrat, or independent, has denied the Times role in allowed lax journalistic standards, which resulted in this misinformation. You are making an argument that has never been made before.

It’s not me who has “swallowed things as truth” that aren’t so.

Yes, they have… I have addressed before the issue of the deceptions that the Clinton/Gore administration used, to justify their domestic and foreign policy actions.

The New York Times themselves admitted – and formally apologized for (in a widely-circulated statement) – their role in providing false information, in the run-up to the current Iraq war. And yes, they were doing so in 1998 as well. Just look it up in the encyclopedia. The Bush adminstration itself has also acknowledged (as a cursory news search will reveal) that they relied on inaccurate information, from the same sources as the Times did. Among these NYT-produced “facts,” that have ended up being unproven or flase, is the infamous “aluminum tubes” claim. Both the NYT and the Bush administration, to their credit, have acknowledged that their methods in obtaining this information were wrong, and that the “information” itself was false, or highly-questionable.

(This is one issue that the Times has faced the most criticism for, in recent years… and one reason why Judith Miller was canned.)

As for the other issues – of course the media was pro-Clinton. In fact, in reporting on the Balkans, a number of the journalists responsible for the false reporting (Christiane Amanpour, Peter Jennings, etc…) had family connections to the Clinton administration’s foreign policy team. (And keep in mind that Clinton was President in 1998, during his ‘Wag the Dog‘ attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere, so it makes sense for the liberal media to support his policies. The Washington Times, a leading national conservative newspaper, editorialized that Clinton’s war against Iraq was [additional] grounds for impeachment.) But I’m not going to once again go over what has been addressed many times before… especially before Finals Week.

P.S. Whatever happened with Milosevic’s trail by the way. I don’t think I have ever seen a news article on that either. Wonder why. Not that this link is going to be of an unbiased nature, but it does give us some insight as to what is happening over there, and it is just not pretty.

http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/

Also, if you have a comment to make here, make it here. Don’t post several links to other blogs that have your comments attached to them. There is a word used in the blogosphere for posting numerous links to your stuff on other blogs that I won’t use here unless you continue to try to do it.

The Washington Post is also very much pro-war, and pro-interventionism.

And during the previous presidency, CNN (the Clinton News Network) was incredibly biased in favor of the war in the Balkans, as were other U.S. media outlets; in some cases, the major reporters there had connections to the Clinton administration.

And some non-liberal news sources, such as the UPI news wire, have also been providing a great deal of negative news coverage and commentary, about the Iraq war situation, and the foreign policy management of the Bush administration.

More on these issues here.

I have dealt with the issue of media bias before… As I’ve said then, the media is undoubtedly liberal, but that does not mean that the media will oppose warfare, interventionism, and other aspects of “liberal internationalism“… It could, in fact, mean the opposite.

A number of liberals in the media supported the Iraq war, including one of the most prominent columnists in America, New York Times writer Thomas Friedman.

…

They were all Italians? Peace

However, I suspect that the problem is rooted in the way that journalists gather data these days. In my article Is there really any doubt (and yes, I’m tooting my own horn, and plugging my own site here), I note that reporters have become less intrepid diggers and more sit-by-the-phone-until-someone-brings-information types. Domestically, all of the major news organizations are cutting back on newsroom personnel, to save money. In a place like Iraq, they’re just playing it safe; even Mr Wong noted, in the NYT article, that this happened in an area:

that is commonly called the Triangle of Death, because of the frequency of ambushes by guerrillas and bandits there.

Mr Wong was sitting in his hotel, with the other scribes, sipping iced tea and waiting for some locals and the military’s public information officers to bring him the news. He never saw what was happening, because he never went there!