n8han archive rss twitter coderspiel

The Bureau’s journalists and researchers spent months engaged in the painstaking and difficult task of gathering documentation on the effects of the top secret U.S. drone program in Waziristan — producing extraordinary findings — only to find themselves and their sources, many of whom are local villagers whose children have been killed, depicted as Al Qaeda’s witting or unwitting allies the very next day in The New York Times, by some senior government official too frightened to put his name on his accusations and aided (as always) by a newspaper that has repeatedly vowed to stop these practices.

The other expert who turns up at the tail end of Dwyer’s piece is an anonymous state official who, “as it happens,” was pulled over for driving in the bus lane and “managed to wiggle out of the ticket.” A member of the placarded class who got busted but didn’t have to pay. Exactly the type of credible source Times readers should trust to render judgment on transportation policy. The official says of the Broadway lane: “It goes against the intent of bus lanes because it causes congestion.”

And here I thought the intent of bus lanes was to help bus passengers reach their destinations quicker. But who needs transit planners, bus drivers, and bus riders to weigh in on a bus lane when cops and anonymous state officials who drive in the bus lane are so generous with their expertise?

It’s 2012, and The New York Times is still crap at reporting on local policy issues of the gravest importance. Blogs of all stripes have been putting them to shame for a decade. I’m not sure what else there is to do, but let media succession take its course.

But even more significant is Egyptian public opinion specifically on the issue of greatest concern for American (and Israeli) foreign policy officials: a nuclear Iran. A 2010 Brookings/University of Maryland/Zogby poll found vast, overwhelming Egyptian support for the view that Iran has the right to have a nuclear weapon, and for the view that a nuclear Iran would be a net positive for the region. That, too, tracks general public opinion in the Arab world, which supports Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons. In light of these facts, does anyone believe that the U.S. government and its pool of experts that exist to justify what it does — the Foreign Policy Community — have even a slight interest in actual democracy in Egypt specifically or the Arab world generally?

What Alterman advocates is a bulwark against the ability of the Egyptian people to free themselves of military rule, choose their own government, and decide their own fate. He wants democracy to exist in Egypt to extend only to the point where Egyptians “choose” to do what the U.S. wants them to do and to end at the point where they want to do something different (in that regard, his vision for “freedom” in Egypt is not unlike what many “freedoms” have come to mean in the U.S.: you can exercise them provided they do not contradict the interests of the U.S. Government). Thus, Alterman announces, in Egypt we must avoid the “clarity” of democracy in favor of something “murkier.”

The NYT‘s own media critic apparently thought this reporting error was significant enough to warrant a long critique — when the error was Fox’s (and indeed, he noted that “other stations in New York City briefly suggested that the protesters might try to shut down the transit system”) – but the NYT, which likely played at least some role (if not the key role) in spawning this erroneous reporting, simply deleted the passage from its article without any acknowledgment of its error, even as its media critic bashed Fox for the same error.

Epic fail.