Shock: WaPo Lards Up Front Page With Red-Headlined (?!) Anti-War Stories, Buries Positive Story On Page 14

It's not merely despicable, it's transparent.

How they can even continue posturing as neutral fact-finders presenting the news without favor or prejudice is beyond me. Do they not even understand they are lying to claim this posture? Or does it simply not even matter to them anymore?

The FT reports that all violent deaths are down by half in Iraq just from last month (and the long-term trendline is even more dramatic), and yet the WaPo feels its front-page coverage should be all about a recent bombing and trumped-up charges against Blackwater.

They always claim that there are "neutral" principles that determine newsworthiness. One of these principles is the "watershed" element -- different news is more newsworthy than more of the same simply because it is new news and not the continuation of the same old news. The MSM justified its wall-to-wall coverage of the initial insurgent attacks because they were a contrast -- a change in storyline -- over the previous one of an easy, quick, relatively low-casualty victory over Saddam's regime.

This principle seems neatly disregarded whenever the storyline changes to a more optimistic take in Iraq. Now, suddenly, "once more, with feeling" trumps the change-in-storyline factor.

At some point this stops being simple bias and because active dishonesty. And I think that point was a couple of years ago, actually.

Thanks to CJ.

posted by Ace at 02:29 PM

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