Once again the New York Times has screwed up. This time they put a fake picture on the front page.
OOPS
In addition: Tomorrow the New York Sun will be doing a story on the soon to be released Barrett report concerning officials in the Clinton Administration and their questionable dealings with the IRS via Drudge .
Wanna bet that won't make the front pages of the NYT?
Update: The NY Sun report on the Barrett investigation is here .
16 comments:
peter:
There is no telling how old this picture is or where it came from.
They just saw an oppurtunity to be stupid and could not pass it up.
I bet that part of the world is covered with all kinds of military hardware.
This is a picture of what happens when the US bombs impoverished villages willy-nilly, leaving children and proud, elderly men standing sorrowful yet stonefaced amidst unexploded ordnance and the rubble of what once were their homes.
It's not meant refer literally to the particular events described in the story, it's a metaphor for any act of wanton destruction by the US military.
morgan:
yeah... yeah... yeah.
Peter, these people saw one thing: a chance to embarass the Bushies...at that point all reasonable thought process went out the window.
Are we all militarists? WEll a Canadian Army guy commenting at Small Dead Animals thinks it's actully an American 155mm shell; speculates that maybe it was being stored in a bomb factory next to the safe house.
Another commenter at SDA writes: "So the picture is wrong. What about the 5 kids killed? Anyone care?"
As if that were the issue. You see, even when they say false but true, they still haven't cottoned on to the idea that it is "false but true" that we find so offensive. They are fighting an ideological war of "values", and conceive values without reference to any facts or thoughts about the necessary basis of any social order, and so they can't quite understand people who believe in truth.
I don't know if five kids were killed or not. I certainly hope not and yes I do care.
But I would like to know why terrorists make a point of both targetting civilians and hiding among them.
Does anyone care about that?
Peter, if they did have a bomb making factory in the town, they might have acquired the unexploded shell from Afghanistan, or anywhere really.
I have a friend on the editorial staff of the NYT and she tells me that there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth over this fiasco, and the editor-in-chief says that "heads are going to roll." The paper is printing a front page retraction of the whole sorry episode above the fold in Tuesday's edition, which will be devoted to a series of pieces from all the major editorialists, including Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, about how the staff realizes that its "get Bush at any price," full speed ahead and damn the truth attitude has ultimately proved self-defeating. The paper is going to adopt a new policy where errors will be immediately acknowledged, and all biases will be stated openly and up front.
***
OK, OK. Everything that I just wrote is completely made up. But I wish it were true, and so all my writing henceforth will be based on that wish.
Jamie Irons
On "fake but accurate": people who want us to feel "compassion" for "five kids who died" think that our response to seeing suffering should not take into account the manipulative means or media by which this real suffering has been put before our eyes. The suffering is real enough, so they just want us to take their/our "compassion" for granted, not question it (compare your neighborhood panhandler who is more theatrically in your face when he sees you with a date... are you more likely to give him money then?)
"Compassion" is a euphemism for guilt, a not entirely rational emotion (because guilt flows from recognizing social differences which are necessary, and often for everyone's good, howevermuch we resent them, a point that gets obscured, of course, when we start justifying wars). And we should pause to consider if our guilt warrants our "compassionate" manipulators manipulating us because they feel guilt for their own privileged NYT reading, latte sipping lives. I think it's important to criticize and separate the euphemism and its manipulation by the media, from one's legitimate guilty feelings for one's bad deeds. We may need to further build up the wall that separates our "feelings" from the ridiculous but often unspoken ideologies that, e.g., make all American success and power into the evil outcome of some zero sum game, which the present global economic and political system is not.
Standing up to the pimps of "compassion" may be a part of the culture war we need to fight more strongly.
yes I see your point Peter. WHether the photo was taken yesterday or years ago, speaks to the degree of the NYT manipulation. ANd the greater the degree the greater our disgust should be, I suppose. But even if it was a totally legitimate photo - in the sense that they had the real missile fragment and the real rubble - they would still be manipulating our "compassion"/guilt in ways I would protest.
o/t--but, what's so funny?
btw, how do our ingenious military guys make those "missiles" land upright and in one piece? do they practice with eggs?
Well....I suppose that a photographer could have been there that quick. I mean, the AP could have gotten an invite to the dinner party, or even as the shell was being dragged into place...
Even for the NYT this is sloppy.
Jamie,
I'm gullible and want to believe the best in people, so you really had me going there for a minute. I have now returned to planet earth.
On 'fake but accurate' they should apply that to WMD in Iraq as well. There surely was an underlying truth there.
Don't feel bad, Jamie had me too.
Syl:
how true.
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