May 30, 2004

NY TIMES Public Editor “Discovers” that the Paper Isn’t Biased!

When the NY Times originally created a position of a Public Editor in order to restore its credibility in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, I noted: “The easy critique of this is that the public editor may be unlikely to be highly critical of the people who sign his checks.”

So it has come to pass.

Today the Public Editor states:

Early this month, though, convinced that my territory includes what doesn’t appear in the paper as well as what does, I began to look into a question arising from the past that weighs heavily on the present: Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the impression that Saddam Hussein possessed, or was acquiring, a frightening arsenal of W.M.D. seemed unmistakable. Except, of course, it appears to have been mistaken.

What a hoot. How can it be mistaken when the U.N. already found them ?

It’s just astonishing how he can claim in print with a straight face that Hussein didn’t possess WMD, when the U.N. itself had documented the existence of those WMD. You can claim we didn’t find them, but you can’t claim Hussein didn’t have them.

This guy’s not biting the hand that pays his bills, that’s for sure.

A Great Night in the Blogosphere

Well, last night’s event was great fun. Amy Alkon’s live-blogging of the panels is here.

Afterwards Matt and Emmanuelle Welch invited people over for drinks. Andrew Breitbart, Cathy Seipp, Luke Ford, Martin Devon, Moxie, and I, among others, joined the Welch’s. As you can imagine a party among bloggers, the conversation was just non-stop irresistible. It went on until after 4 a.m. Nobody wanted to leave.

Moxie took great pics, and I took a good one of her as well, which may appear on her site.

Update: the pic I snapped of her is up on Moxie’s site.