How soon we forget

When the New York Times broke a story on how some 380 tons of explosives, powerful enough to detonate nuclear warheads, were missing from a former Iraqi military facility that was supposed to be under American control, conservatives immediately worked to discredit the story.

Currently the accuracy of the story is up in the air. In the end it will probably be accurate, just overplayed. But will the Kerry campaign suffer for jumping all over the story? Liberals who end up disappointed that the Times let them down on an important story, just as CBS did with the National Guard story (destroying a good story with sloppiness), only have themselves and a short memory, to blame.

During the 1990s the New York Times waged a sloppy, inaccurate war against Bill Clinton but because liberals don't fight as hard as conservatives, many of the stories stuck in the public's mind. From the Times initial inaccurate story/headline on Whitewater to the Wen Ho Lee story, which the Times had to apologize for, the Times established a poor journalistic standard.

The Times, and the Washington Post, refused to apologize for their poor Whitewater coverage and yet liberals still thought they were "their" newspaper. Early on in the Bush administration John Harris of the Post pointed out that the new administration were being subject to the same treatment. Harris wrote this new president has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton. Take it from someone who made a living writing about those uproars.

So why did the liberals get fooled again? They thought the Times and Post were just going after the current administration rather than just practicing bad journalism. The Post and the Times may be interesting reading, unfortunately one may have to treat them like the Washington Times, Interesting, if true.