All the News That's Fit to Reprint
Best of the Web Today
BY JAMES TARANTO
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 4:32 p.m. EDT
Yesterday's New York Times carried a story on a new poll that found an increase in the number of Americans retrospectively backing the liberation of Iraq:
<<< Americans' support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. . . .
Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out. >>>
Today, the Times Web site carries a follow-up story:
<<< The war in Iraq is the single most important ongoing news story right now. Public opinion about the war is a critical part of that story. That's why when we had a poll finding about the war that we could not explain, we went back and did another poll on the very same subject. We wanted to make sure we had gotten it right.
It turns out we had gotten it right. Support for the initial invasion of Iraq, as measured by a question The New York Times/CBS News poll has asked since December 2003, increased modestly compared to two months ago. >>>
The Times explains why it thought a second poll was necessary:
<<< The polling took place during a week when there was no shortage of news about the war. Congress was debating the war, the Bush administration issued a report saying the Iraqi government had failed to meet many of the benchmarks it was supposed to meet and prominent Republicans were distancing themselves from Mr. Bush on the conflict. . . .
The July numbers represented a change. It was counterintuitive. >>>
Well, two cheers for the paper's diligence, but this also seems to be about as close as we're going to get to an admission of bias: an acknowledgment that those at the Times are flummoxed that the public is not responding the way they expect to all the bad news they've been reporting.
Meanwhile, check out this piece from today's Times:
<<< President Bush sought anew on Tuesday to draw connections between the Iraqi group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the terrorist network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, and he sharply criticized those who contend that the groups are independent of each other. >>>
The Times spends over 1,000 words covering the "debate" between President Bush and the Democrats over whether al Qaeda in Iraq has anything to do with al Qaeda everywhere else, without noting that the leading institution pushing the notion that they are unconnected is the Times itself, which is so eager to disjoin the two al Qaeda subsets that it insists on referring to Iraq, in this context only, as "Mesopotamia."
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