Letters to the Editor
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Toronto Reader and Sartrewasright
Thank you for posting, you are like Radio Marti to your southern neighbors right now. We Americans need to hear day in and day out from countries that still respect the truth and real moral values. It's difficult to find intellectual air to breathe in a country that believes that ignorance is a virtue, and is being taught by its corporate overlords that money, muscle, and a disdain for the law are American core values.
Maybe Canada could end this dark night by setting up huge broadcast stations all along the border to infiltrate the U.S. with news and views on how the rest of the world really sees us right now. Our own fourth estate has abdicated.
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Distorting the truth to criticize distortions of the truth
I am regularly astonished at how the anti-war left seems to have no qualms at all about using distortions of the truth, unsupported allegations, cherry-picked facts, and outright lies to criticize Bush administration policies, which, as we all know, have often been shamelessly based on distortions of the truth, unsupported allegations, cherry-picked facts, and outright lies. Take, for instance, the comment headlined "Wheres the media covrerage?" [sic] The Salon editors have seen fit to bequeath it with an "editor's choice" star, even though it makes Curveball look like a paragon of veracity.
The comment accuses the "MSM" of ignoring the issue of rendition. There have been "some brief articles" about Maher Arar, the writer says, but they've been relegated to page 5, and once they've run, the story has "disappeared." But, hey, who cares about that stuff, the writer goes on to say, when can just "pop over to the NYT" and read about teeth grinding.
It takes just a couple of minutes of fact checking to show that the Salon "editor's choice" comment is absolute nonsense. The New York Times has provided massive, ongoing coverage of the Maher Arar case, with 71 articles to date mentioning him by name, including many lengthy stories, such as a 1385-word story on September 25 and a 1094-word story on Oct. 30. The
Washington Post has published 56 stories mentioning Maher Arar.
I'm not denying that the issue of rendition is "under the radar" for most Americans. But, heck, many Americans probably still know little or nothing about Iraq. What I'm disputing is the writer's demonstrably false allegation that the "MSM" has "abandoned its civic and public responsibility to expose government abuse and cover-ups."
I'm disturbed by that false allegation, and its widespread acceptance among anti-war lefties, because it is yet another example of the self-righteous, sanctimonious, Naderite cynicism that led several million Americans to believe eight years ago that there was no difference between Al Gore and Bush/Cheney. It is that sort of cynicism that bears 100 percent of the blame for the Iraq war in my opinion, and that I fear will pave the way for the Iran and Syria Wars by leading several million Americans to sit out an election that pits Clinton against Guliani.
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@markthomp
It takes just a couple of minutes of fact checking to show that the Salon "editor's choice" comment is absolute nonsense.
The New York Times has a daily circulation of about 1.1M, Sunday about 1.6M. The Washington Post has a circulation about half of that.
If you take another "couple of minutes" and do searches on ABC,NBC,CNN, etc., you will find that each outlet did between 3 and 10 stories on the subject (be careful, most of these sites have search engines that don't eliminate duplicates). They have viewership figures like: ABC News 8.6M, NBC 9.9M,CBS 7.8M.
On at least one outlet, CNN, two of the three articles were about the U.S. government announcing that they still thought Arar was a terrorist.
I think your comments bear some truth, but to believe that the American public is being adequately served by the MSM is garbage.