NYT: Genocide So Much Worse Than Fact-Fudging
We've been a little worried about the Times apparent lack of concern over the allegations that its intrepid Metro Desk flubber, New Post-New Post-Journalist Alan Feurer, invented a few details in his copy while playing foreign correspondent in Iraq. (Really, what is truth? Does it matter? Serotonin and dopamine dictate everything, that's all you need to know.)
Luckily for us, Slate's Professor of Media Criticismology explains:
In Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, Laurel Leff condemns Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger for keeping the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews off Page One during World War II. Beverly Ann Deepe Keever's News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb accuses the newspaper of advancing U.S. government propaganda about nuclear weapons. And Howard Friel and Richard Falk's The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy blames U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq on the Times because, among other things, it hasn't properly explained to its readers how international law prohibits military adventurism.
Ah, we get it now: making shit up doesn't hold a candle to helping Hitler, nuking Pacific Islanders, or invading Panama. (Noriega deserved it, after all.) Alan, buddy, you're so off the hook. Take as much "liberty with your reminiscences" as you please. Hell, fudge the last 69 years of the paper's history while you're at it — creative writing is the new journalism!
