Margaret Sullivan (the NY Times public editor not the actress) wrote a column to answer the criticism of the NY Times lack of Benghazi coverage.
She characterizes the public's desire for information about what happened in Benghazi as only a tool of the Obama critics.
The attacks last fall on an American diplomatic mission and C.I.A. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four American government employees, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, have become a flash point for critics of the Obama administration who see what happened as proof of the president’s incompetence, or worse. They see the aftermath as a cover-up.The article written the day before the "whistle blower" hearings points out that
So it wasn’t a particular surprise that perturbed readers have been writing to me this week about The Times’s silence, as they see it, in advance of hearings this week on Capitol Hill. (Last fall, I criticized The Times for keeping a Libya hearing story off the front page when it was treated as major news elsewhere; I also wrote that it had failed to “connect the dots” for readers about what had happened.)
Those comments gained heat after The Washington Post led its print edition Tuesday with an article, quoting the United States diplomat Gregory Hicks, laying out a situation that he said might have averted a second attack.
The Times has not picked up on that story line and, so far, has not written about the hearings, although other news organizations have done so.She goes on to point out stories the Times has written about Benghazi and sums concludes by blaming it on Fox News.
Here’s my take: The angry criticism of The Times on Benghazi has been based largely on politics, not journalism, and fomented by Fox News. (The conspiracy narrative goes like this: The Times is a liberal newspaper unwilling to take on a liberal president and his administration.) In fact, what’s been written in The Times has been solid. But my sense is that, starting last fall, The Times has had a tendency to both play down the subject, which has significant news value, and to pursue it most aggressively as a story about political divisiveness rather than one about national security mistakes and the lack of government transparency. Many readers would like to see more on that front, and so would I.Here's my take Ms. Sullivan the New York Times has long since abandoned its mission is to find the truth. If your editors at the Times had bothered to get off their arses and do their job like other media (instead of regurgitating tired liberal talking points) perhaps they would have realize that it is the mainstream liberal media such as the NY Times creating the political divisiveness by protecting the administration instead of investigating what happened on Sept 11th in Benghazi.
Perhaps if the New York Times hadn't spent the last few decades as nothing but a progressive mouth-piece it would be increasing audience and ad revenue the way Fox News does.
And please don't think its just the Benghazi story, it's Solyndra, it's Fast and Furious, it's the way the paper characterized Mitt Romney using the Obama campaign talking points, it's the Gosnell trial....I could go on and on but I don't want to spend a week on this.
Fox News is not attacking the NY Times for political purposes, nor because it's a competitor, the NY Times is not in its league. Fox News goes after the Times as part of their search for the truth an exercise the NY Times could learn from. Perhaps if the Times spent more effort searching for the truth and a little less repeating progressive talking points that "Grey Lady" wouldn't have become what it is today, a tired old money-losing whore prostituting the truth for progressive politics.
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"But my sense is that, starting last fall, The Times has had a tendency to both play down the subject, which has significant news value, and to pursue it most aggressively as a story about political divisiveness rather than one about national security mistakes and the lack of government transparency."
Seems she admits they buried it.
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