By Peter Hannaford on 1.12.07 @ 12:06AM
The taxi driver who spoke for an entire nation.
Meet Deeq Salad Mursel, Somalia's new national pollster and
spokesman. How do we know? Why the New York Times told us
so in its January 10 edition. It ran an article about the U.S. air strike the previous
day on a cluster of Islamist fighters trying to flee the country
near the Kenya border.
The strike was widely reported as having been successful in
killing several of the Islamists. Apparently, Ethiopian
intelligence sources had provided the U.S. with information that a
number of Islamist leaders -- routed by the Ethiopian and Somali
armies several days earlier -- were going into the bush by convoy
to escape capture. The air raid apparently killed about a dozen of
them. U.S. military sources were careful not to claim proof that
the dead included one or more leaders of the U.S. embassy bombings
in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, but were clearly hoping they would
be able to do so in due course.
Would you have had any hint of all this from the
Times's headline? No. It read: "Airstrike Rekindles
Somalis' Anger at the U.S." So that was the real story.
And what proof do we have that this was the outcome? Why, none
other than Deeq Salad Mursel, a Mogadishu taxi driver. Mr. Mursel
is quoted as saying, "They're just trying to get revenge for what
we did to them in 1993" (referring to the Black Hawk Down
incident). That is the only reference to and "evidence" of
"Somalis' anger" in the entire article -- and it occurs in the
fourth paragraph.
We can infer from the headline and Mr. Mursel's quotation that
he has quit his day job with the taxi and is now busily counting
noses as the national pollster and, once armed with a
scientifically-random samples' opinions, has been anointed by the
fledgling government of Somali to speak for all its citizens.
Or can we? This is only the most recent and obvious example of
the Times's inclination to slant headlines to fit its
agenda. It has long organized its daily story budget to fit its
agenda which is, broadly speaking, opposed to the projection of
U.S. power; opposed to Republican presidents and administrations
and for the expansion of federal government power. Story headlines
are not written by the reporters of a story, but by editors, the
same editors who work on the day's story budget. Story selection
and the weight given to those selected are complemented by
headlines that fit the same political/policy agenda.
The Times hasn't hesitated to release classified
information about efforts to identify and locate terrorists. The
editors, from their lofty perches, have deemed it more important to
publish the information than to catch and/or stop terrorists at
their trade.
Many newspaper editors are thin-skinned, none more than those of
the Times. They consider themselves to be above reproach;
models of rectitude. Even when the egregious Jayson Blair wrote
invented stories a few years ago, it took weeks of exposure and
pressure before the then-editor, Howell Raines, stepped down.
All this might not matter so much if the "big three" broadcast
networks did not base their own evening news story selection and
slant on what they read in the Times each morning. And,
many newspapers across the country rely on the Times news
service to provide them with national and international
stories.
For 30 years or more pollsters have been tracking the votes of
"elite media" reporters and editors in presidential elections. Time
after time these polls show that their votes for the Democrat have
been in the 90 percent range. Human nature being what it is, is it
likely that these people will set aside their personal views of
politics and the world and select and write stories and headlines
that are free from bias? It is likely only if one believes in the
tooth fairy.
The New York Times's motto has long been "All the News
That's Fit to Print." It's time to update it to fit today's
reality: "All the News That's Fit to Print--and Some That Isn't,
but Fits Our View of the World."
topics:
Trade, Islam, Military, Africa
