Monday, February 28, 2005

Al-Qaqaa? What? Where?

Oh. The munitions dump in Iraq where allegedly some amount of high explosives were stolen.

Byron York at NRO rips the New York Times for its juvenile and shockingly obvious attempt to affect the outcome of the election with the Al Qaqaa story in the week leading up to Election Day.

...In all, in the eight days from October 25 to November 1, the Times published 16 stories and columns [several front page and extremely long, ed.] about Al Qaqaa, plus seven letters to the editor (all of which were critical of the Bush administration).

And then, abruptly, it stopped. In the four months since the election, the Times appears to have simply dropped the Al Qaqaa story, publishing nothing about the munitions dump and the supposedly critical issues it raised about the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq. After November 1, according to a search of the Nexis database, just one story in the Times, a November 29, 2004, piece by John Burns, has contained the words "Al Qaqaa," and that story did not concern the munitions issue.


Clearly, for the New York Times, Al-Qaqaa was only an issue for the purposes of preventing President Bush's re-election.

No comments: