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Washington Post: "Black Is White, Up Is Down"
09/15/2003

Ramesh Ponnuru exposes blatant, very significant deception at the Washington Post:

My eyes just about popped out of my head when I read this passage from a front-page story in the Washington Post today: "Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia's ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. 'I don't want to speculate,' he said, adding that Sept. 11 is 'over with now, it's done, it's history and we can put it behind us.'"

I was going to write an attack on Cheney for Corner readers, but I figured I should check the transcript of Cheney's remarks to make sure he hadn't been taken out of context--especially after I saw that Dana Milbank was one of the authors of the Post article.

Good thing I did.

Apparently, Cheney's meaning was exactly the opposite from what the Post claimed it to be. Y'know, I've been very frustrated lately, reading around the Internet, at a common view of goings on in the War on Terror and the war/reconstruction in Iraq and at the conclusions that people have drawn from what they believe to be reality. Reading the arguments from my perspective, it feels as if every single line would have to be addressed to handle the slight taint that each piles onto the mound of errant thinking. But these distortions in the mainstream media help to explain a good portion of the problem.

Has anybody set up a blog or Web site yet that collects and analyzes the "correction" statements of the major papers each day? I know I've been tempted to undertake the project of fact-checking an entire newspaper, just to see what percentage of stories cannot be taken at face value. But who has that much time? (Some might suggest that obviating the need to spend that time is what we pay the newspapers for in the first place.)

Posted by Justin Katz @ 04:46 PM EST