Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Knight-Ridder Blows a Quote
Stephen Hayes busts Knight-Ridder for serial factual sloppiness.
The structure of the piece does not lend itself to exerpt here. But the Knight Ridder's failures--while sadly all too common--are serious.
They reflect an utter failure of journalists to think about the Iraq war with any kind of focus or precision. Their knee-jerk response, in article after article, is to turn everything into a story about presidential politics.
No.
This story must not be about presidential politics. The focus must be on a soberminded and precise analysis the specific relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
The cloudy and muddle-headed analysis being served up by half-blind journalists too busy chasing juicy quotes to bother to read for detail is going to deceive our electorate and sooner or later, cause this Republic to make some very bad decisions.
I'll say it again:
There is no evidence that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
There is a mountain of evidence that Saddam's government and Al Qaeda were cooperating in other ways.
No one in the Bush administration ever suggested the former.
No serious thinker or policy analyst is disputing the latter.
The fact that we have no evidence that Saddam was specifically complicit in the 9/11 attacks in no way refutes the assertion that Saddam and Al Qaeda were indeed cooperating in other ways.
After all this time, any reporter covering this beat too thick-headed to figure that out is a danger to her readership and ought to be fired or go back to covering high school track meets.
But you'll see that meme repeated a thousand times before the election.
Read Hayes' whole piece.
Splash, out
Jason
The structure of the piece does not lend itself to exerpt here. But the Knight Ridder's failures--while sadly all too common--are serious.
They reflect an utter failure of journalists to think about the Iraq war with any kind of focus or precision. Their knee-jerk response, in article after article, is to turn everything into a story about presidential politics.
No.
This story must not be about presidential politics. The focus must be on a soberminded and precise analysis the specific relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
The cloudy and muddle-headed analysis being served up by half-blind journalists too busy chasing juicy quotes to bother to read for detail is going to deceive our electorate and sooner or later, cause this Republic to make some very bad decisions.
I'll say it again:
There is no evidence that Saddam collaborated with Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
There is a mountain of evidence that Saddam's government and Al Qaeda were cooperating in other ways.
No one in the Bush administration ever suggested the former.
No serious thinker or policy analyst is disputing the latter.
The fact that we have no evidence that Saddam was specifically complicit in the 9/11 attacks in no way refutes the assertion that Saddam and Al Qaeda were indeed cooperating in other ways.
After all this time, any reporter covering this beat too thick-headed to figure that out is a danger to her readership and ought to be fired or go back to covering high school track meets.
But you'll see that meme repeated a thousand times before the election.
Read Hayes' whole piece.
Splash, out
Jason
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