The transformation of The New York Times is more or less complete. The newspaper long known for a liberal sensibility that sometimes bled from the editorials into the news stories has, over the past decade or so, essentially become the media auxiliary of the Democratic Party.
Above all else, it’s the Times’s antipathy toward the Bush administration that is astonishing to behold – an attitude that has gone from a level of merely adversarial to one of institutional loathing; it has become a living, panting thing that permeates every section of the paper on any given day.
The Times’s zeal for condemning Bush is so reflexive, so unthinking, that little things like consistency get lost in the shuffle. Judah Kraut, a doctoral student in Ancient Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, noted just such a lack of consistency last month on his “Sour Kraut” blog (sourkraut.blogspot.com), and it’s worth some consideration here.
Kraut quotes from page 343 of the 9/11 Commission Report: “It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that bin Laden was a terrorist leader, with the headline “U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.” ”
Kraut notes: “The Commission’s reference to this headline is telling, but it does not adequately convey the depth of The New York Times’s downplaying of the terrorist threat posed by bin Laden. A more complete picture can be derived from the text of the article to which the headline was affixed. Two sentences in particular stand out: “In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world’s most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program ‘Frontline,’ working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.” ”
Kraut makes the point that “Some two-and-a-half years before bin Laden commanded the most horrific terrorist attack on U.S. soil, The New York Times “found him [bin Laden] to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.” To add insult to injury, we now know – from interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (p.149 in the Report) – that it was during this exact time period, “late 1998 or early 1999” that “Bin Laden … finally decided to give KSM the green light for the 9/11 operation.” ”
Kraut then moves in for the kill: “One would expect that the Times, having themselves been duped and having rejected the accurate portrait of bin Laden by “American officials” as “the world’s most dangerous terrorist,” would avoid assigning blame based on 20/20 hindsight – or, at the very least, would acknowledge that the paper, too, had fallen prey to the exact failures it so high-mindedly pointed out concerning the government?s pre-9/11 record.
“Of course, the Times did the opposite. In a blistering editorial that appeared in May of 2002, the Times lamented – among other things – the mounting evidence of “monumental ineptitude and bureaucratic bumbling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies…”
“Throughout the piece, the Times editors are aghast at how badly the federal government was fooled. It was necessary to “determine why Washington failed to recognize that Osama bin Laden was on the hunt in America last summer.” The paper’s view is adequately summed up (though less caustically) in the second paragraph of the editorial: “The entire national security and law enforcement apparatus under-estimated the possibility that the bin Laden network might strike targets in the United States, and various agencies either failed to detect or mishandled warning signs.”
“Seriously. Where could they have gotten that idea that bin Laden wasn’t much of a terrorist threat” “