Lies Of The Times

Katha Pollitt has a brilliant column on the difference between news and trivia:

It's embarrassing to see Times brass flagellating themselves with tiny Blair corrections ("The sister of Corporal Gardner is named Cara, not Kara") while weighty issues of news content go unaddressed. For all their slapdash dishonesty, none of Blair's stories affected the course of any event. That cannot be said of the paper's relentless pushing of Whitewater, which helped stall a presidency but ended without a Clinton indictment, or its unfounded, life-destroying pursuit of Wen Ho Lee.

At the present moment, the question of whether Rick Bragg personally witnessed the "jumping mullet that belly-flop with a sharp clap into steel-gray water" is trivial compared with Judith Miller's credulous reports on Iraq. Here we have a Pulitzer-winning reporter who alleges that an unnamed Iraqi scientist has proof both of WMDs and of Saddam's connections with Al Qaeda and Syria. Miller got this fascinating scoop from her Army handlers--she never questioned him herself; indeed, she never even met him! She allowed the Army to vet her copy and determine the timing of its publication. Result: a front-page story that was trumpeted everywhere as the retroactive justification for war.

With these same words, and without mentioning their names, Pollitt also demonstrates that Kaus, Sully, Kurtz et al. are full of shit.