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HI — I mistakenly posted this on a six day old comment area, so I am doing it again.
Here’s a lengthy addendum to a letter to the editor of the New York Times (submitted exclusively to them for publication) that I had as a PS. The letter addressed the “nuisance spin” fast-emerging as the replacement for the long-unchallenged “flipflop” spin as a means to engineer a victory for Bush at the polls in November, to act as at least the appearance of a “mandate” (mandatory mandate) for his invasion of and occupation of Iraq, etc.
by cloudy
[Since you never publish any of my letters anyway, I would like to add a few comments about this issue, given the centrality of the New York Times’ own coverage to this controversy which could very easily cost Kerry the election. Matthew Bai’s article was grossly distorted in a number of ways. I suppose the editors of the New York Times are both hearing and going to hear that from a number of readers, and with similar inevitability will insist that the interpretation was valid, if not absolutely apt.
But especially since it is difficult for a Democrat — especially someone of Kerry’s overall approach — to really lay into the paper (as I believe he should), it would behoove the paper to devote a VERY lengthy op-ed piece to the best credentialled and most worthy, by the Times’ own judgment and standards specifically to a critique of the article as distorting Kerry’s position on terror and creating an opportunity for Republicans to exploit. I understand that the position described by Bai is not the same as that presented by Bush, Guiliani, Morris and no doubt a Republican feeding frenzy of others, probably soon to be joined by voices in the mainstream press like David Brooks.
But the dispute over the article’s interpretation itself, before we get to the Republican’s distortion of the picture presented in the article is something that, before the week is out, will be a central if ignored undertow theme to this emerging central issue in the campaign. I noticed when I read it that the article was unfair to Kerry, and could be exploited. As of Monday night, it was obvious that the issue was becoming central. At least in the interests of fair debate, such a superlength column — necessary to answer Bai’s superlong article — is the only way to live up to the ethos, as distinct from some ‘regulation’ of equal time.

I will add an example from my own recollection regarding the New York Times. Rosenthal, in Jan 1994, ran the opening piece of what I term the Khallid Abdul Maurice Templesman Muhammad affaire, that was one of the factors that significantly assisted Bill “The Shill” Clinton in giving us a Republican Congress in that year’s elections, a legacy with which the country still suffers and was a major factor in making opposition to the Iraq war in Congress difficult.
As that issue was raised and became grossly exploited (and I am not alleging that, understood literally, Rosenthal’s coverage unfairly distorted what Khallid Abdul Maurice Templesman Muhammad was saying or its noxious character) the New York Times then also failed to address the consequences of its own spin doctory according to the principles of responsible journalism — responsible in the sense of letting all significant voices have adequate say in the debate (eg oped) rather than in taking a ‘responsible’ position or in reporting with a bias comfortable to a given reader or readership. For example, although the Congressional resolutions ostensibly to condemn antisemitism — that, to their eternal shame, both Houses of Congress passed unanimously without a single voice to stand up to debunk the sleazy underlying agendae of those resolutions — was memorably described in passing in a New York Times editorial as a “resolution condemning Farrakhan”, the issue was nowhere further explored. This systematic evasion is an example of the kind of irresponsibility I am talking about. Even as you publish only ‘what is fit to print’ you have a moral and professional obligation not to consign to such passing treatment important issues in which you yourself have had such a major hand. Indeed much of the mayhem this article is generating is precisely because it was originally printed in the US newspaper of record. In the instance of the resolution, the use of a Congressional resolution on the issue of antisemitism, based on a controversy originating in the New York Times, as a vehicle for attainder or the laundering of attainder by code language merits more than the passing mention of a craven pseudo-opposition. Nor do other conflicts the paper has with the powers that pee diminish this responsibility, even by implication, by a single iota. I know that my own voice on the subject of the 1994 controversy was never heard in the Times. This time there are no doubt plenty of secularly significant voices other than simply figures from the Kerry campaign (like R Beers), who would be more than happy to dissect the Bau piece critically stem to stern in the kind of column mentioned above. You owe it to the children of Iraq, and so many others, not to repeat what your error of omission of 1994 as well as at other times in merely going through the motions of truly being a fair forum of debate on crucial issues.]
c/c