An "interesting" piece by Glenn Greenwald, in Salon, on how The New York Times, contrary to it's masthead "All the News Fit to Print" in fact doesn't - and engages in self-censorship.
"Earlier today, I wrote in detail about new developments in the case of Raymond Davis, the former Special Forces soldier who shot and killed two Pakistanis on January 27, sparking a diplomatic conflict between the U.S. (which is demanding that he be released on the ground of "diplomatic immunity") and Pakistan (whose population is demanding justice and insisting that he was no "diplomat"). But I want to flag this new story separately because it's really quite amazing and revealing."
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"It's one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme -- Obama's calling Davis "our diplomat in Pakistan" -- while the NYT deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That's called being an active enabler of government propaganda. While working for the CIA doesn't preclude holding "diplomatic immunity," it's certainly relevant to the dispute between the two countries and the picture being painted by Obama officials. Moreover, since there is no declared war in Pakistan, this incident -- as the NYT puts it today -- "inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. " That alone makes Davis' work not just newsworthy, but crucial."
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"Following the dictates of the U.S. Government for what they can and cannot publish is, of course, anything but new for the New York Times. In his lengthy recent article on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller tried to show how independent his newspaper is by boasting that they published their story of the Bush NSA program even though he has "vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade [him] and the paper's publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story"; Keller neglected to mention that the paper learned about the illegal program in mid-2004, but followed Bush's orders to conceal it from the public for over a year -- until after Bush was safely re-elected."
"Earlier today, I wrote in detail about new developments in the case of Raymond Davis, the former Special Forces soldier who shot and killed two Pakistanis on January 27, sparking a diplomatic conflict between the U.S. (which is demanding that he be released on the ground of "diplomatic immunity") and Pakistan (whose population is demanding justice and insisting that he was no "diplomat"). But I want to flag this new story separately because it's really quite amazing and revealing."
****
"It's one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme -- Obama's calling Davis "our diplomat in Pakistan" -- while the NYT deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That's called being an active enabler of government propaganda. While working for the CIA doesn't preclude holding "diplomatic immunity," it's certainly relevant to the dispute between the two countries and the picture being painted by Obama officials. Moreover, since there is no declared war in Pakistan, this incident -- as the NYT puts it today -- "inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. " That alone makes Davis' work not just newsworthy, but crucial."
****
"Following the dictates of the U.S. Government for what they can and cannot publish is, of course, anything but new for the New York Times. In his lengthy recent article on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller tried to show how independent his newspaper is by boasting that they published their story of the Bush NSA program even though he has "vivid memories of sitting in the Oval Office as President George W. Bush tried to persuade [him] and the paper's publisher to withhold the eavesdropping story"; Keller neglected to mention that the paper learned about the illegal program in mid-2004, but followed Bush's orders to conceal it from the public for over a year -- until after Bush was safely re-elected."
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