were dead by then? How many more would die as the damage was already done?
Should we go on?
New York Times Rewrites Fallujah History
11/16/04
November 16, 2004
(NOTE: Please read the update to this alert .)
In three recent reports about the military invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, the New York Times has misreported the facts about the April 2004 invasion of the city and the toll it took on Iraqi civilians.
On November 8, the Times reported: "In April, American troops were closing in on the city center when popular uprisings broke out in cities across Iraq. The outrage, fed by mostly unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties, forced the Americans to withdraw. American commanders regarded the reports as inflated, but it was impossible to determine independently how many civilians had been killed."
The next day, the Times made the same point, reporting that the U.S. "had to withdraw during a previous fight for the city in April after unconfirmed reports of heavy civilian casualties sparked outrage among both Sunni and Shiite Iraqis." And on November 15, the Times noted that the current operation "redressed a disastrous assault on Fallujah last April that was called off when unconfirmed reports of large civilian casualties drove the political cost too high."
It's unclear why the Times considers those civilian deaths "unconfirmed." While there is some debate over precise figures, this wording leaves the impression that nothing can be reasonably known about deaths in Fallujah.
...
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1999The Times hold people accountable? That's pretty funny if it were so grisly. The consequences of what they have done and do on a daily basis are staggering.
How can you defend the NY Times? As the major mouthpiece of this criminal State they are complicit.
They do it in so many different ways as is the case with any propagandist.
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The sustained activism around the Downing Street Memo compelled some in the media to explore why it had elicited such little coverage. The New York Times’ new public editor, Byron Calame, took up the case in his first foray into representing readers (NYTimes.com, 5/20/05), prompted by what he called “a flood of reader email.”
According to Calame, Times Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman explained that he felt the Downing Street Memo was simply the “interpretation” of the British head of intelligence and therefore “not a smoking gun that proved that Bush, Tenet and others were distorting intelligence to support the case for war.” Calame deemed Taubman’s defense “holding fast to a high reporting standard.” Given the extremely flimsy evidence the Times required for stories that supported the Bush administration’s drive for war, that would seem to be not a high standard but a double standard.
NPR cast a more critical eye on the Times’ coverage of the memo. On the May 22 Weekend Edition, NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr called the memo “the under-covered story of the year,” singling out the New York Times for its failure to “get around to reporting it until last week and on an inside page, apparently no big deal.” While the criticism is on target, it’s a curious exercise in finger-pointing, since the story was apparently even less of a big deal at NPR, which had run exactly zero reports on the memo up to that point—a fact that went unmentioned in Schorr’s report.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler (5/8/05) initially noted that Post readers had complained about the lack of reporting on the memo, but offered no explanation for why the paper virtually ignored the story; the next week, after FAIR referred in a media advisory (5/10/05) to Getler’s lack of comment, he revisited the issue (5/15/05) in much more detail. (The ombud gave backhanded credit to FAIR and the group Media Matters for America—both “self-described media watchdog organizations”—for prompting him to delve into the story.)
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http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2612
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