• New York Times Points Out “Racist Overtones” in Libyan Rebel Disinformation It Helped Spread

    Claims that the Libyan government was employing African mercenaries against the rebels were given credence in some left-wing media as well, even after information contradicting the claims began to surface: e.g., “. . .  [I]t must be pointed out that the Qaddafi regime helped create the conflict [“violence against Black Africans by Libya’s rebel forces”] […]

  • New York Times Oversells WikiLeaks/Iranian Missiles Story

    WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them.  There’s one conventional response, which goes something like this: “There’s nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!”  But there’s another option: “There’s nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we’ve been pushing.”  In those cases, WikiLeaks is deemed very, very […]

  • New York Times Tale on BP Oil Spill: From Bad to Worse

    The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad.  Helping the paper flesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed “a conservation group in Corpus Christi, […]

  • New York Times, Iran, and the “International Consensus”

    A deal between Iran, Brazil and Turkey to ship some of Iran’s uranium out of the country to be enriched in Turkey and returned for use in an Iranian medical reactor has elicited some elite media panic.  An early New York Times Web headline read, “Iran Offers to Ship Uranium, Complicating Sanctions Talks.”  The Wall […]