'Le Plus Ça Change' – NY Times Hit for WMD Gullibility

[displacedtexan]

'Le Plus Ça Change' – NY Times Hit for WMD Gullibility
by Jim Lobe

If Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential U.S. press critic and foreign-policy columnist of the 20th century, were alive today, chances are he would shake his head knowingly and mutter something like, "Le plus ca change, le plus c'est la meme chose." ("The more things change, the more they remain the same.")

After all, it was in 1920 that he and a colleague, Charles Merz, wrote in their analysis of New York Times coverage of the Bolshevik Revolution between 1917 and 1920 that the newspaper's reporting on Russia during that period was "nothing short of a disaster."

snip

Eighty-four years later, the same question is being asked about the performance of the mass media – especially the Times – on reporting about Iraq, particularly the prewar and even postwar assumptions that the country possessed vast stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and had reconstituted its nuclear-arms program.

snip

Many of those articles were based on assertions by unidentified senior officials and "defectors" who, it now turns out, were often supplied by exile groups opposed to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, notably the Iraqi National Congress (INC).



more...

http://antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2052

[ex_jew]

1. As Men in Black correctly pointed out...

even the New York Times gets it right sometimes. But it is amazing how little useful information one gets from the "newspaper of record". I gave it up when they announced that 9/11 made the actual results of the 2000 election "irrelevant". A highly dangerous institution, more for what it does not report than what it does.