Today's New York Times carries a front-page article under the headline, "Outcry Grows Over Police Use of Force in Genoa." That's old news to readers of the Wall Street Journal, which on Monday ran its own front-page article about the outrage -- focusing on the same incident, a police raid at the Armando Diaz school complex. Monday's Wall Street Journal article reported, "A visit to the school several hours after the raid showed pools of blood on the floor and walls and several teeth strewn around." Today's New York Times reported, "Television crews arriving on the scene later filmed pools of blood and teeth knocked out during the raid."
Today's Times article, while waddling in two days after the Wall Street Journal, does provide some new details about Americans involved in the Genoa clashes. But the Times struggles to put the best face on the protesters. The article initially refers, for instance, to a student from New Jersey "who was arrested with an Austrian theater group as it was leaving Genoa." It's only in a sidebar, and much later in the same front-page story, that the "theater group" is identified as a "protest group." The sidebar reports that the student was studying whether there was common ground between Quakers and "more radical groups promoting social activism in Europe." "Social activism" is a rather vague and generous way to describe what radical European groups are promoting.
Injustice: A report in the business section of today's New York Times about the Microsoft antitrust case says, "The Justice Department has asked the courts to move quickly to complete the case so that any remedy imposed would have relevance to the fast-changing computer software industry. Today it issued a terse response to the appeal, saying that the case should be thrown out because of Judge Jackson's conduct."
This can easily be read as saying the Justice Department says the Microsoft case should be thrown out. That would be front-page news if it were true. But it's not true. It's not the Justice Department's response but Microsoft's appeal that says the case should be thrown out. But given the clumsy way the Times writes it, a reader could easily get the wrong idea.
Reckonings: The "Reckonings" column on the op-ed page of today's New York Times refers to the "bipartisan" commission on Social Security reform, putting "bipartisan" in snide quotation marks. The 16-member commission named by President Bush included eight Democrats and eight Republicans. There is a Republican co-chairman and a Democratic co-chairman. President Clinton, the most recent Democrat to hold the White House, himself suggested a plan to privatize partially the American retirement system. There's no good reason for the columnist to question the bipartisan nature of the effort. The column goes on to refer to the "ultra-conservative Cato Institute." If the ultra-liberal columnist bothered to check, he might realize that Cato is libertarian, not ultra-conservative.
Order: The twisted illogic of Indykism is on view in full force in today's New York Times. On the op-ed page, the former ambassador to Israel brags that Yasser Arafat is "very much in control of the nine security organizations he established to maintain order in the West Bank and Gaza." This is laughable. Mr. Arafat didn't establish those nine security organizations to maintain "order" -- if he wanted order, he would have established a constitutional system with checks and balances and the rule of law. He established the nine security organizations to maintain personal dictatorial control. If Mr. Arafat cared about "order," he wouldn't be countenancing terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Times's own editorial, today, meanwhile, adopts a defeatist view: "On the Palestinian side, there is no democratic politics and little realistic possibility of a peaceful change of power," the Times writes. On that basis, the newspaper urges "a renewed Israeli willingness to recognize that for now," Mr. Arafat is "the only realistic Palestinian negotiating partner." Is there any blood-soaked two-bit dictator, one wonders, that the Times editorialists wouldn't advocate negotiating with?