There you go again, New York Times

I just e-mailed The New York Times requesting a correction of the Bumiller/Rohter fiction extravaganza I wrote about last week.

And the next thing I read from the Times is in the same biased ballpark.

The paper of record dutifully (gleefully?) reported on an Iraqi unit that abandoned its post in Sadr City, Iraq. An American officer argued with the Iraqi commander to get him to hold his ground.

Captain Veath’s pleas failed, and senior American and Iraqi commanders mounted an urgent effort to regain the lost ground. An elite Iraqi unit was rushed in and with the support of the Americans began to fight its way north.

This episode was a blow to the American effort to push the Iraqis into the lead in the struggle to wrest control of parts of Sadr City from the Mahdi Army militia and what Americans and Iraqis say are Iranian-backed groups.

(The New York Times)

The first sentence of the second paragraph could pass for news analysis with no difficulty whatsoever. I could find no notice in the online version to indicate that it was intended as other than news.

As analysis, how does it stack up? A blow to the effort to get Iraqis to take the lead in Sadr City fighting, eh? How big of a blow could it have been when an Iraqi unit took the place of the deserting unit?


I heard Michael Yon praise the work of a number of mainstream press reporters the other day during a radio interview. I don't recall whether Michael R. Gordon was one of them.

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