You might have thought that the obvious lede would be that the wrong guy was in the White House, but the 9/11 attacks had intervened between the start and the end of the media recount. So, the Times and other major news organizations buried their own findings so as not to undermine Bush's authority amid a crisis. The big media focused on various hypotheticals of partial counts that still had Bush "winning."
While one might sympathize with the Times' reasons for misleading the public, what the Times did was not journalism, nor was it a case of treating the American citizens as the true sovereigns of the nation who have a right to know the truth. It was a case of protecting the legitimacy of the Establishment. Those of us who noted the actual vote tabulations were dismissed as "conspiracy theorists," though we were not.
[For the details of how a full Florida recount would have given Gore the White House, see Consortiumnews.com's "Gore's Victory," "So Bush Did Steal the White House," and "Bush v. Gore's Dark American Decade."]
Rationalizing War
So, when we got to Bush's plans for invading Iraq in 2002, the Times had already shown its commitment to play ball with whatever the government was saying, no matter how dubious the claims. And, even the humiliation of having been caught publishing a false story about aluminum tubes being evidence of Iraq reconstituting its nuclear weapons program didn't get the Times to change course.
Although one of the reporters on that story, Judy Miller, eventually did leave the newspaper (and landed on her feet at Fox News), the lead author, Michael Gordon, continued as the Times' national security correspondent. Even more stunning, columnist Bill Keller, who wrote an influential article rallying "liberals" to the cause of invading Iraq, was elevated to the top job of executive editor afterhis Iraq gullibility had been exposed.
Even in the rare moments when the Times claimed it was standing up to the Bush administration, such as publishing James Risen's article in December 2005 exposing the warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the reality was not exactly a new chapter in Profiles in Courage.
It turned out that the Times had been sitting on Risen's story for more than a year -- it could have been published before the 2004 election -- but Bush demanded the story's suppression. The information was finally shared with the public in late 2005 only because Risen's book, State of War, was scheduled for publication in January 2006 and included the disclosure, a prospective embarrassment for the Times.
The pattern of the Times bowing down to the White House continued into the Obama administration. Whenever there has been a dubious claim that the U.S. government directs against some foreign "adversary," the Times dutifully takes the side of Official Washington, rather than applying the objectivity and impartiality that are supposed to be at the heart of U.S. journalism.
For instance, on Aug. 21, 2013, when a mysterious sarin gas attack outside Damascus, Syria, killed several hundred people, the Times simply fell in line behind the U.S.-driven rush to judgment blaming the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
There were immediate reasons to doubt that conclusion -- Assad had just invited in United Nations inspectors to investigate cases of Syrian jihadists using chemical weapons -- but the Times and other major Western outlets simply fingered the already demonized Assad.
Though we now know that U.S. intelligence analysts did not consider Assad's guilt a "slam dunk" -- and later key elements of the case against Assad collapsed, such as the Times' miscalculation of the maximum range of the sarin-laden rocket -- the Assad-did-it stampede almost led to a major U.S. military retaliation against what now appears to have been the wrong people.
Current evidence points to a likely provocation by radical jihadists trying to trick the West into entering the war in a big way on their side, but the Times has never fully retracted its false claim that the rocket was fired from a Syrian military base, which was four times outside the rocket's range.
Indeed, to this day, Times' columnists and other Western journalists routinely cite Assad's guilt -- and President Obama's supposed failure to enforce his "red line" against chemical attacks -- as flat fact.
The MH-17 Case
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