This morning's New York Times is full of sentences in news stories that stand in plain contradiction to reality. Consider:
A story in the international section about a meeting between President Clinton and the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, contains the following sentence: "Mr. Clinton is eager to resolve the decades-long standoff in the five months left of his presidency, but officials say that in reality the end of September, just before Israeli elections, is the last opportunity to reconvene a gathering of Middle East leaders." There are no major Israeli elections scheduled for just after the end of September. There just aren't. It's just not true. While Prime Minister Barak does face waning parliamentary support, his government has not fallen, and there has been no parliamentary vote to schedule new elections.
There's also a story on the front page of the New York Times about American plans to build a radar station in Alaska as part of a missile defense. The Times article contains the sentence: "There is universal agreement that building the radar site would amount to a treaty violation." Again, this is just plain not true. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, has said that the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 is moot, because it was signed with a power, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. You can't violate a treaty that is no longer in force. So, again, this claim by the Times that there is "universal agreement" that building the radar site would violate the treaty is just not true.
Then, there is an article in the national section of today's New York Times about Senator Joseph Lieberman's view of religion in public life. The story notes that the Anti-Defamation League had issued a statement criticizing Mr. Lieberman for his emphasis on faith. Then the Times says, "The senator declined to discuss the statement today, ignoring reporters' shouted questions as he hurried from a convention of the Communications Workers of America that he had addressed here." But in fact, Mr. Lieberman did not decline to address the statement. He apparently did address the statement, but the Times apparently missed it. Another newspaper in New York, the New York Post, reported: "'I think faith is a source of strength and purpose in our society,' Lieberman -- the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket -- told the Post in California after getting chided by the Anti-Defamation League. 'I respect them, but I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, because I believe it's the American way.'"
The same Times article mischaracterizes the ADL statement. The Times says the ADL issued a statement saying "religion should have no place in the political arena." The ADL statement said nothing of the sort -- in fact, it explicitly said, "Candidates should feel comfortable explaining their religious convictions to voters." The ADL statement said "there is a point at which an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate and even unsettling." That's a far cry from the Times's paraphrase to the effect that "religion should have no place in the political arena."
Finally, in the same article, the Times parrots unchallenged the claim by the Lieberman camp that he "opposes organized prayer in public schools." As Smartertimes.com noted on Monday, while Mr. Lieberman was serving as attorney general of Connecticut he filed a brief in the Supreme Court case of Wallace v. Jaffree in which he supported an Alabama law permitting teachers to lead their classes in a prayer that said, "Almighty God, You alone are our God. We acknowledge You as the Creator and Supreme Judge of the world. May Your Justice, Your Truth, and Your Peace abound this day in the hearts of our countrymen, in the counsels of our government, in the sanctity of our homes and in the classrooms of our schools in the name of our Lord, Amen." In so doing, Mr. Lieberman sided with the Reagan administration's Justice Department, the Moral Majority, the Christian Legal Society and Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. Opposing the Alabama school prayer statute were the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Jewish Congress. Mr. Lieberman even made a campaign issue of the matter in his successful run for the U.S. Senate against Lowell Weicker, criticizing Mr. Weicker for opposing school prayer.