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New York Times Strikes (McCain) Again

By Justin Paulette
Apr 17th 2008 10:20AM

Filed Under:eJohn McCain, Iraq, Iran, 2008 President, Media

On April 8th, the New York Times ran an article (to which I linked in a previous post) which falsely stated:

In a trip to the Middle East last month, Mr. McCain made an embarrassing mistake when he said several times that he was concerned that Iran was training Al Qaeda in Iraq. (The United States believes that Iran, a Shiite country, has been training Shiite extremists in Iraq, but not Al Qaeda, a Sunni insurgent group.) He repeated the mistake on Tuesday at hearing [sic] of the Senate Armed Services Committee.


The final sentence of this paragraph is simply false. McCain made no such statement (Powerline has the full text). Furthermore, McCain's previous "mistakes" were almost certainly mere slips of the tongue, which would undoubtedly have been immediately overlooked by anyone not consciously seeking to construct a derogatory story. Nine days after conservative blogs pointed out the Times' "mistake," the paper of record has printed a quasi-correction:

Correction: April 17, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article last Thursday about foreign policy advisers to Senator John McCain referred incorrectly to an error he made at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 8. He briefly referred to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a Shiite group, rather than a Sunni group; he did not repeat an error during the hearing that he had made on a trip to the Middle East last month when he said several times that he was concerned that Iran, a Shiite nation, was training Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a Sunni group.


First, an editing error does not explain a substantive attack awkwardly inserted into a larger piece to which it is tangentially related (at best). Nevertheless, I challenge anyone to find the transcript passage in which McCain confuses Al Qaeda for a Shiite group. This would prove impossible because A) it still did not happen, and B) no one outside the media calls it Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. That label, as some remember, evolved out of a conundrum when Democratic candidate John Kerry announced that there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq ... just about the time a group calling itself "Al Qaeda in Iraq" committed several acts of terror. The media couldn't report the story without painting Kerry as a liar or a fool - so they "re-translated" Iraq as Mesopotamia in order to cover Kerry's mistake.


The Times consoles itself for having been caught (yet again) in a lie about a Conservative by fully repeating its precarious assertion that McCain made mistakes when speaking in the Middle East - thereby successfully manipulating its apology for slandering McCain into yet another slander of McCain. This is not the first shameless salvo by the Times in this election (see here and here), and it will not be the last.


UPDATE: As an aside, the New York Times Company posted a $335,000 loss this quarter, "one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen. ... The company's main source of revenue, newspaper advertising in print and online, fell 10.6 percent, the sharpest drop in memory...."

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