The New York Times spins away
This morning’s front page headline at the online Times was horrifying: “At Least 7 Afghan Children Killed in U.S. Airstrike.” The first two paragraphs describe carnage and what appears to be inaccurate intelligence:
The American-led coalition forces in Afghanistan killed seven children during an air strike on what they say was an Al Qaeda base in the east of the country, the military said in a statement today.
The air strike, which took place on Sunday night, hit a compound in the Zarghun Shah district of the border province of Paktika, which contained a mosque and a religious school and which the coalition forces said intelligence had shown was being used as a safe house for Al Qaeda fighters.
It’s only when you get to the third paragraph that you discover that the intelligence was good and that there were, in fact, militia leaders on site:
Several militants were killed in the strike, and two militants were also detained, the coalition said. The children’s deaths come amid mounting civilian casualties in Afghanistan and rising public anger in the country over them.
The next paragraph explains that a lot of civilians have been dying in recent raids, making the Afghanis really angry. Only in the paragraph after that one does the Times quote an Army spokesman who makes a point about the same problem Israel routinely struggles with in dealing with Palestinians and Hezbollah — human shields:
“We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants’ cowardice,” Army Maj. Chris Belcher, a coalition spokesman, said in the statement. “We had surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside the building.”
Oh, and by the way, now that the Times is dealing with actual facts, not a political agenda, it turns out that this carefully targeted air strike followed an attack in which the Islamists terribly targeted civilians, killing 24 people and injuring scores more, with most of the dead being police on their way to work:
The attack followed a mammoth bombing by insurgents in Kabul on Sunday, which killed at least 24 people and was one of the deadliest insurgent attacks in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Of those killed, 22 were police academy instructors on their way to work.
The blast occurred at 8:15 and was powerful enough to shear off the roof and both sides of the bus and uproot many of the front seats.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, with Zabihullah Mujahid, who said he was a spokesman, saying in a phone interview that a suicide bomber had infiltrated the police and guilefully boarded the vehicle.
Kabul’s police chief, Esmatullah Daulatzai, said the precise tactics of the attack were unclear. “Our investigation shows that a suicide attacker jumped into the vehicle and blew himself up,” he said.
Whatever the method, it was spectacularly lethal, unleashing shards of glass and metal into a crowded area beside police headquarters, the governor’s office and the national archive. Two other vehicles were ripped apart by the explosion. The wounded included pedestrians waiting at an adjacent bus terminal.
Raz Muhammad, a policeman standing guard at headquarters, was among the first to reach the scene. “Those in the front seats, their bodies were very ripped apart,” he said. “Half of their heads were gone and there was brain matter all over. Very few of those inside survived. I could help those able to walk.”
There is confusion about the death toll. Police officials originally said 36 had died, but the chief later amended that number, adding that 52 people were wounded, including 38 who had to be hospitalized. It remains possible that more than 24 people perished. Bodies were taken to more than one hospital and then quickly released to families, perhaps sacrificing an accurate mortality count.
Indeed, the remainder of this article is about the horrors of the Taliban attack on civilians.
So now we know how a New York Times article is structured: Bury the major story in the last part of the article. Open with an attack on America. And slowly reveal that both the headline and lead paragraphs are misleading. That’s great journalism...
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