To its credit, the New York Times Book Review today publishes a review debunking a new book accusing Israel of deliberately killing 34 Americans in the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. The review says this section is the book's "weakest," that the claim "hardly seems plausible" and that the author "sides with the conspiracy theorists," and "rather too credulously," at that. All of which makes it even more egregious and inexplicable that the New York Times news department spun this book's claim into a full-length news article on April 23, 2001, a news article so one-sided that, as Smartertimes.com noted on April 23, 2001, the article didn't even include a fresh comment from the Israeli government responding to the allegation. The Times book review suggests that perhaps the book's analysis "has been skewed" by the author's "palpable distaste for the Jewish state." What, readers are left to wonder, was it that skewed the coverage of the book's claim by the Times news department?
For more on the USS Liberty, check out the article by Michael Oren in the Israeli journal Azure.
Distracting Issues: The editorial in today's New York Times asserts, "Bill Clinton struggled to enact his economic policies and health care reforms amid the chaos created by his swirling personal style and distracting issues like gays in the military." Well, the Times may consider gays in the military a "distracting" issue, but for a newspaper that periodically pats itself on the back for its support of gay rights, it's a bit of a strange way to phrase it. The issue wasn't "distracting" for gays trying to serve in the military; to them, it was actually pretty important.
Driving Drunk: An article in the Style and Entertaining "Part 2" of this morning's New York Times magazine reports on an alcohol-soaked dinner. "The drive home was in defiance of some serious laws, but at that time of year the roads on far eastern Long Island were almost empty," the Times reports. Well, guess that's the New York Times attitude toward drunk driving: Just try to avoid heavy traffic.
Old Saw: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports that Atlanta "saw its downtown compared to a flea market and an unsolved bombing that marred the games." This is poorly worded; it sounds like the downtown is being compared to an unsolved bombing. It also violates the Times style rule on "saw." The Times stylebook says "saw is a journalese mannerism in this kind of sentence: 'The scandal saw 33 officers arrested; The day saw 11 people injured.' Neither scandals not days can see." Atlanta can't see, either.