Editor&Publisher: 'NYT' Public Editor Hits Paper's Surge in Blaming 'al-Qaeda' in Iraq
By E&P Staff
Published: July 08, 2007
NEW YORK In a remarkable column today, Clark Hoyt, the newly arrived public editor at The New York Times, charges that the Times in recent weeks has too often gone along with the new drive by the White House and the military to blame insurgent attacks on al-Qaeda. The column arrives on the same day the paper calls for a U.S. pullout in Iraq.
E&P last week had noted the same tendency in the Times in the reporting of Michael R. Gordon and others. A top Times editor admits to Hoyt that the paper's reporting in this regard has become "sloppy."...
Today, Hoyt charges that the Times "in recent weeks...has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq — and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.
"And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.
"There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements."
He then quotes Middle East experts he talk with who dispute the heavy focus on al-Qaeda. Then Hoyt reveals:
"Recent Times stories from Iraq have referred, with little or no attribution — and no supporting evidence — to 'militants linked with Al Qaeda,' 'Sunni extremists with links to Al Qaeda' and 'insurgents from Al Qaeda.' The Times has stated flatly, again without attribution or supporting evidence, that Al Qaeda was responsible for the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra last year, an event that the president has said started the sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shiites."...
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