NY Times Admits it Lied to Help Bush

[DanS]

He bases it - as do the editors who publish his stuff and that of other reporters - on interviews he has conducted. In this case 60 in number.

These are rich primary sources. Wouldn't you agree? (Btw, I thought it was 60 interviewees, 300 or 400 interviews.) All the historians that I know would give their left nuts for access to these kinds of primary sources.

No different from any other journalist and remote from the inference which the irritating article asks us, mistakenly, to draw.

Could you tell me again the inference that the article asks us to draw?

It seems to me that some other print journalists do not reach the level of sourcing that Woodward does and that they envy him (at least in the US).

Incidentally I, in common with all the world, thought we owed a considerable debt to Woodward and Bernstein for their persistence over Watergate. But I have changed my mind since. Hardly a journalist exists who does not yearn to earn undying fame by exposing some poor soul through the wonders of "investigative journalism". Which means in practice that the only place you get any actual reporting of facts is in the sports pages or when the local paper sends someone to the flower show. Elsewhere there is just cheap, slanted, head hunting junk.

I've come to similar conclusions myself over Iraq. The press is a weapon. It's disgusting. Personally, I have gotten into the habit of skipping the front section and going straight to the business and science & technology sections. But those sections have problems too.

However, I must admit again that I don't find the American print press as objectionable as Brit print press (excluding the FT, which seems on the whole to be a notch above the others). Reporting, analysis, commentary, and editorial is labeled as such. The reporting over here doesn't seem to be political, although the conclusions drawn do have bias -- sometimes more obvious than others.

Maybe you're right that all of these sophisticated structures don't amount to anything in the long run. Maybe the move away from print press as political party organ has made the reporting no less of a lie. Maybe I'm just having smoke blown up my ass. Sometimes I wonder which intelligence services are paying these reporters to write the things they do...

I've also come to lose a lot of faith in the human rights groups and the protest movement over Iraq. You add the press into the mix with these groups and it's one big circle-jerk.

I'll have to think about your point about Watergate more.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
it still doesn't change the fact that most major newspapers in the united states are far more interested in blood and action than they are politics.

that would charecterize TV. Maybe it charecterizes most papers. I daresay it did NOT charecterize the NYT under Raines.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by DanS
I think that "Washington is the center of the world" stuff is massively overblown.

Note the

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DanS
Thank god somebody eventually took the bait I was offering.

Not at all. Note that Powell didn't apologize for the administration's rush to war despite KNOWING beforehand they were using very shaky evidence (i.e. Niger uranium claims). It's a substantially different situation.

It's also too little, too late. The NYT hasn't been cornered, unlike the administration, into admitting its mistakes--it has done so without any sort of public embarassment beforehand. How long has it taken the administration to drag its heels on this? And still no acknowledgement of bad judgement on their part, just blaming everyone else for the problems.

[DanS]

Hey just because what you think are mistakes aren't acknowledged by the administration, doesn't mean they don't acknowledge their mistakes.

The administration acknowledged its mistakes on the question at hand, as has the NYT.

[Boris Godunov]

You don't seem to be able to recognize the difference between scapegoating others and admitting mistakes. The administration hasn't issued any mea culpa nor has it acknowledged that it made grievous errors in judgement. It's just shifted the blame to others, be it the CIA, FBI, Iraqi informants or "rogue soldiers."

But if you want to continue stretching this analogy of two dramatically different situations, be my guest.

[DanS]

Just because you label something a grievous error in judgment doesn't make it so.

On the issue here, Powell said that he was wrong on the facts, so far as he now knew. He described how he and the intelligence community got to the conclusions that he presented, but that in the end those conclusions weren't factual because the sources were wrong.

I don't know what more you were seeking. Wringing of hands? Nashing of teeth? Self-flagellation? BJs for everybody?

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DanS
He described how he and the intelligence community got to the conclusions that he presented, but that in the end those conclusions weren't factual because the sources were wrong.

Except we have good reason not to trust his credibility here, as we know the administration actively ignored the warnings from intelligence officials in the past over their information being dubious. We come back again to the use of the "evidence" of the Niger uranium by Bush, despite them being told it should not be put into the SoU address.

Did the admin apologize for the deliberate deception? No, instead they passed the buck to the CIA.

Should we expect a little more delligence from our government and intelligence people when it's a matter of going to war? I certainly think so, and to compare it to the NYT affair is trivializing the seriousness of these "intelligence failures."

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if the administration had known all along the intelligence was dubious and ran with it anyway to have every justification possible. We do have the reports, after all, that Powell's initial reaction when seeing the evidence he was to present to the UN was to toss the dossier aside and proclaim it "horse****."

[DanS]

Did the admin apologize for the deliberate deception?

It was neither deliberate nor a deception. I dismiss the rest of your post for the same reason -- your assumptions are bad.

[Kuciwalker]

DanS: Boris' point is that they (Bush and co.) have only admitted wrong when pressed hard, and have not taken as many steps towards verifying sources as the NYT.

[DanS]

However, in the issue we're dealing with now (Chalabi, et al.), neither of those things are true. The administration admitted it before the New York Times did and verified its sources better than the New York Times both before and after we knew the information was wrong.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DanS
It was neither deliberate nor a deception.

So you assume, but it's not hard to see why you're probably mistaken by using basic reasoning skills.

I dismiss the rest of your post for the same reason -- your assumptions are bad.

I'd say you're the one making the bad assumptions by making some horrendously naive statements about what politicians are telling you.

[DanS]

So you assume, but it's not hard to see why you're probably mistaken by using basic reasoning skills.

I'd say you're the one making the bad assumptions by giving making some horrendously naive statements about what politicians are telling you.

It doesn't seem likely to me that an organization that can't keep sexually degrading pictures out of the paper could play-down such wide differences among the administration and the intelligence community. Washingtonians are very bad at keeping secrets like this.

There was a broad concensus that was flat wrong. The concensus on what Saddam had was palpable in this town, as evidenced by the Washington Post's strong editorial support for the war. The concensus was multiple sourced. The sources were checked. The former president's administration thought the same thing. It was a slam dunk. But in the end, the concensus was flat wrong.

I was here through it all. I don't need to assume.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DanS
It doesn't seem likely to me that an organization that can't keep sexually degrading pictures out of the paper could play-down such wide differences among the administration and the intelligence community. Washingtonians are very bad at keeping secrets like this.

So why did the Administration use the Niger uranium report in the SotU address again?

It's just an example of intentional misuse of material they knew was circumspect.

There was a broad concensus that was flat wrong. The concensus on what Saddam had was palpable in this town, as evidenced by the Washington Post's strong editorial support for the war. The concensus was multiple sourced. The sources were checked. But in the end, the concensus was flat wrong.

And my point is that this is inexcusable in a situation wherein we are heading to war over such information and those making this consensus are charged with deciding the fates of men. The Washington Post and NYT et al. aren't intelligence agencies, and unless you're declaring that they should be as good at information-gathering and verification as the CIA. There's also the fact that the NYT got a lot of its information through the rose-colored lenses of the administration itself.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by DanS
I was here through it all. I don't need to assume.

Oh I see...living in DC means you have some sort of special knowledge of the intent of the administration that, say, New Yorkers won't have? Sorry, unless you work for the CIA or administration, that doesn't mean much to me.