CSPAN claims to have realvideo of the Raines speech, accessable from c-span.org , but there seems to be a mislabeling problem there. The alleged "part 2" actually had W at the beginning. Disinformation!
The only coverage google turned up of the event was from the Washington Times, a black pot on the bias front if there ever was one. Just for amusement:
Bias? What bias?
New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines has been criticized for his paper's increasingly liberal slant on the news. But last week, Mr. Raines fired back, saying he is the victim of an "attempt to convince the audience of the world's most ideology-free newspapers that they're being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias."
Accepting the George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award at the National Press Foundation's awards dinner on Thursday night, Mr. Raines worried that "those of us who work for fair-minded publications and broadcasters have been too passive in pointing out the agendas of those who want to use journalism as a political tool."
Mr. Raines said: "The most important development of the post-war period among journalists, American journalists, was the acceptance throughout our profession of an ethic that says we report and edit the news for our papers, but we don't wear the political collar of our owners, or the government, or any political party. It is that legacy we must protect with our diligent stewardship. To do so means we must be aware of the energetic effort that is now under way to convince our readers that we are ideologues. It is an exercise in disinformation of alarming proportions." washingtontimes.com
Elsewhere, google came up with this funny Joshua Marshall bit on the NYT's alleged "bias" problem. I think there was considerable local whining about this incident when it happened. Marshall's take still seems topical. From talkingpointsmemo.com :
Howie Kurtz has a piece today on the new conservative complaint that The New York Times is tossing aside whatever objectivity conservatives feel the Times has left to prevent a war against Iraq. The accused here, of course, is Times Executive Editor Howell Raines. I have no brief for Raines. His years of crusading against Bill Clinton from his perch as editor of the Times OpEd page makes my personal sense of him pretty much permanently negative. And I haven't paid sufficient systematic attention to the Times Iraq coverage to say definitively what tilt I think there might be. But this brouhaha over whether the Times distorted the position of Henry Kissinger to advance its own editorial line (portraying Kissinger as a critic of administration policy when in fact, say the conservatives, he was endorsing it) tells enough of the tale.
If you read the Kissinger piece and the Times article and you understand the terms of the debate you cannot help but conclude that the Times characterization of what Kissinger said is vastly more accurate than the characterization being peddled by conservative Iraq-hawks. In the Iraq debate, the attitude toward inspections is fundamental. The administration line -- emanating from the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President -- doesn't believe in them at all. Neither tactically nor strategically. The fact that Kissinger says we should start by "propos[ing] a stringent inspection system that achieves substantial transparency of Iraqi institutions" makes him, by definition, a critic of administration policy on a fundamental point.
What you have here is the fun-house episode in which Charles Krauthammer and others are tendentiously misconstruing what Kissinger said and then simultaneously falsely accusing Times writers of doing what he has in fact himself just done.
At the end of the day, Kissinger dissents from Bush's policy while Krauthammer says he supports it. If there's a contest for distortions here Krauthammer wins easily.
(First, let's deal with a few other points. In fairness to everyone in this debate one has to point out that Kissinger's piece was, as John Judis noted last week in TPM, intentionally muddy and opaque. It lends itself not so much to misinterpretations as self-serving interpretation. A la Krauthammer, et.al. Another point: the Times article everyone is discussing is the Purdum and Tyler piece from August 16th. The piece the next day by Elizabeth Bumiller -- which the critics also mention -- does use a shorthand (putting Kissinger in a "a group of Republicans who were warning him against going to war with Iraq") which glosses over much of what he said. But to make too much of this line -- after the Times discussed the fullness of what Kissinger said the day before -- would be to fall into Krauthammer's mau-mauing trap, scrutinizing every line in every Times piece when his own column is filled with mistatements, tendentious misconstruals, intentional ignoring of awkward data, and so forth.)
Now another point: when I talked with Kurtz yesterday for his article I said I thought the Times was doing a good thing by reporting on all the downsides of going to war with Iraq. Frankly, no one else is. Tucker Carlson got himself in an embarrassing moment yesterday on Crossfire when he got out-argued by the editor of the Village Voice on this Kissinger question. But recently he's been saying that elected Democrats have abdicated their responsibility by basically sitting out the debate over Iraq policy. And on this I'm sad to say I think he's right. By and large they're just not saying anything. That's too bad. Because the Democrats could help themselves and their country by outlining a policy for regime change which is not as amateurish and ill-considered as the one the administration is currently pursuing.
Next up, why it makes sense to push inspections first if you're serious about getting rid of Saddam and why someone should be telling the public about all the dangers involved in a strike against Iraq -- something which most of the hawks want to ignore. |
