haiti...,
2004-05-29 17:59:45
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meet your new prime minister...,
2004-06-02 20:15:22
clearer ombudsmanisms:
this debate, and WaPo ombudsman Getler's sycophantic performance:
"After 9/11, there was virtually no [American] public opposition to attacking Afghanistan to get Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. But almost immediately after a flawed attempt to get bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001, the administration began to talk more about Saddam Hussein and less about bin Laden."
See, we didn't just blast official war propaganda as loudy as possible and bury every skeptical report we came across to please our sources and advertisers, we were just too slow to note a shift in what the administration was "talking" about - by "talking" we refer to the steaming poo shipped by the truckload and shovelled onto our desks twice daily, through which we send well paid, overfed glorified copy-editors to rummage for the day's headline because when Washington ships you steaming poo it's always News. If we were to talk about something else we might no longer get direct shipments, and the real failure was failing to notice the change in stench. Anything else is a cheap shot.
Only the poo deficient European presses are partisan, our poo rich papers use 100% bi-partisan poo. Doesn't matter which ass it came out of, either, so long as the source is on a high enough stool, and because our glorified copy-editors have high standards of professionalism that help them tell good poo from bad, except when they don't.
Nobody had a mind to notice that there were still a few poorly paid, underfed journalists working at the paper, because the idea 70 years ago had been to slowly starve these throwbacks off. Some of us were quite surprised to find a few lurking around in the basement, sneaking 400 word blurbs onto page A17 when the printers weren't looking. Conveniently we can use them in our defense if some bad poo gets by our discerning eye. Clearly it is not yet time to impose the final solution, but I will say I'm envious of CNN and the networks as broadcasting has no history of such ancient monstrosities.
