The Times: Another Self-Inflicted Wound

As someone who has been out ahead of the Bush administration’s pathetic efforts to blame Al Qaeda for everything in Iraq with the least insurgent taint, you coulda knocked me over with a feather when I read a recent column by Clark Hoyt, the ombudsdude of the once mighty New York Times.

The Times, of course, covered itself in camel excrement in buying into the White House line lock, stop and barrel in the run-up to the Iraq war and as Hoyt notes, they’re still doing the same thing with the White House’s serial Al Qaeda claims.

In a column headlined "Seeing Al Qaeda Around Every Corner," Hoyt (photo) chastises the Gray Lady for helping the administration play the blame game:

"I went back and read war coverage for much of the month of June and found many stories that conveyed the complexity and chaos of today’s Iraq. . . .

"But those references to Al Qaeda began creeping in with greater frequency. Susan Chira, the foreign editor, said she takes 'great pride in the whole of our coverage' but acknowledged that the paper had used 'excessive shorthand' when referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. 'We’ve been sloppy,' she said.

"On Thursday, she and her deputy, Ethan Bronner, circulated a memo with guidelines on how to distinguish Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia from (Osama) bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.

"It’s a good move. I’d have been happier still if The Times had helped its readers by doing a deeper job of reporting on the administration’s drive to make Al Qaeda the singular enemy in Iraq."

Hoyt’s column begs a larger question: Giving embarrassing scandals ranging from the Jayson Blair fiasco to the Judith Miller disaster, has The Times truly lost its mojo as that shining beacon of newspaper journalism?

As a career editor and reporter who often had to fly by the seat of my pants and never had the substantial infrastructure of editors and fact checkers that The Times has to keep it honest, I regret to say that I believe it has.