PrintOctober 13, 2007
Crickets Chirping at the Times in Response to Medal of Honor Award
The very first Medal of Honor awarded in Operation Enduring Freedom is being given to a Long Island, New Yorker, a Navy Seal named Lt. Michael Murphy. Every single major newspaper in the New York metro area has given glowing coverage to Lt. Murphy and and his heroics - even the liberal Newsday.
Every newspaper save one:
By now, most folks know exactly how much The New York Times despises the U.S. military. How it detests any mission that involves U.S. troops - whether to protect Americans by killing terrorists or to help stave off a bloodbath in the Middle East. How the paper works tirelessly to promote its anti-war, anti-military agenda - even in its supposedly objective news pages.This is the kind of decision made at the highest levels of the Times editorial braintrust. A local boy honored with the highest decoration the American military can bestow and the "Paper of Record" who promises to publish "All the News That's Fit to Print" refuses to cover the story?
So while Bush's announcement merited stories and appreciative editorials in The Post, The New York Sun, the Daily News and even the front page of liberal Newsday, it shouldn't be all that surprising that the Times didn't publish a single word about Murphy's well-deserved honor. What did the paper of record focus on yesterday?
No fewer than three stories reported on how Americans had killed innocent Iraqi civilians.
In this scenario, the story could have been assigned to a reporter who may have actually submitted a piece for publication only to have the story killed by higher ups. I simply cannot believe that a story so newsworthy could have slipped through the cracks and not been covered.
An alternate explanation could be that word came down from above that the Times would not cover the story. Either way, the decision to ignore a story that every other newspaper in the New York metro area deemed worthy of extensive coverage could only have orginated at the top - perhaps with Sulzberger himself.
If the Times keeps insisiting that they do not have an anti-military bias, they are going to have to come clean about why they didn't cover this story.
Sounds like a job for the Public Editor Clark Hoyt. Here's his contact info:
E-mail: public@nytimes.com
- Phone: (212) 556-7652
- Address: Public Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
