The Better to Rewrite History, M’dear!

John Hinderaker at Powerline brings us a huge boner by the NY Times – a “mistake” that is so huge, it changes the whole premise of the story, and thereby turning it from an “important story” to…well…no story at all.

An article on Saturday about a federal judge’s order regarding photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal misstated a deadline and the response by Defense Department lawyers. The government was given until Friday to black out some identifying details in the material, not to release it. Defense Department lawyers met that deadline, but asked the court to block the public release of the materials. They did not refuse to cooperate with an order for the materials’ release.

In order to understand the magnitude of the Times’ error, you have to read the original article. As noted, it was published on Sunday, when the Times’ circulation is by far the highest. The “fact” that the Times has now corrected was the entire substance of the article. The headline on the story read: “Government Defies an Order to Release Iraq Abuse Photos.” The article began:

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge’s order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

The lawyers said in a letter sent to the federal court in Manhattan late Thursday that they would file a sealed brief explaining their reasons for not turning over the material, which they were to have released by yesterday.

The Times reporter, Kate Zernike, managed to locate a representive of the American Civil Liberties Union…But Ms. Zernike quoted no representative of the government, and apparently talked to none; if she had, she would have realized that the entire premise for her story was incorrect. So millions of people were wrongly told that the “Government”–i.e., the Bush administration–had “defied” the order of a federal judge. If true, this would have been a noteworthy story. But it was a complete falsehood. What percentage of the readers who saw the Times’ headline on Sunday do you suppose read the correction in today’s paper? I’d be surprised if the number was as high as 1%.

Now, I hate to be cynical, I really do. But I must say, when I read something like this – a story being made up out of whole cloth – I do have to wonder…why are they doing this? Is the answer really as simple as: “Incompetence and malicious over-zealousness to find fault”… or is it “the easier to clutter up reference materials with historical inaccuracies for down the road.”

Yeah, yeah, I know. Cynical. Paranoid, even. I guess I would feel a little less so if somewhere a MSM newspaper did a front page story with the headline: NY TIMES GETS MAJOR STORY COMPLETELY WRONG.

I mean…the premise would not be in error, after all.