NPR highlighted the bombing deaths of 30 or so at a Sunni Shiite reconcilliation meeting. Nobody thought to comment on the fact the THE SUNNIs AND SHIITES ARE ATTEMPTING TO RECONCILE. That subtle point seems to have been missed by those folks as they cover the Iraqi slide into civil war..

Hi Bob, nitpick - the US government doesn't recognise the name-change of Burma, hence the US newspapers don't either.

Agreed this claim should be front page, although I no more believe it than A-jad's claims of a gay-free nation.

Regards, C

Cernig, you've got sort of a point.

CNN and the New York Times, obviously not U.S. news sources, refer to the country in question as Myanmar. ;-)

Knowing the NY Times, I am surprised they printed it at all.

I must admit I read this blog on a regular basis as you well know CY and find it informative and entertaining, but may I make the constructive comment that it is time to lay off the liberal-media throwing the war theme, just for a couple days? You write a story and make your conclusion and move ahead. Otherwise, you discredit yourself and earn a reputation as being the exact thing you critique, a political extremists who goes too far. By now, I know what Beauchamp best likes for breakfast and his favorite color. I am not saying there aren't leftist out there distorting the truth wrongfully, but that is expected on both sides of the political spectrum no matter what time we live in. You learn to take in both sides and assess the truth somewhere in the middle.

John, I suggest reading this post once more. I'm not making a "evil liberal media" post here, but one asking why a story containing such good potential media fodder and a potential to generate traffic, buzz, and ad revenue got buried near the back of the section.

I'm questioning an editorial/business decision of burying this when their featured content is stale. I carefully avoided any left/right here, and instead merely pointed out "there is plenty of room to doubt his pronouncements from both the right and the left."

it is time to lay off the liberal-media throwing the war theme, just for a couple days

Why? So they can continue to do so in a frictionless environment?

Ain't it amazing how John takes a story about the NY Times and immediately assumes that you're attacking the lefties, CY?

That in itself is illustrative of how the NY Times is viewed, methinks.

"I'm not making a "evil liberal media" post here, but one asking why a story containing such good potential media fodder and a potential to generate traffic, buzz, and ad revenue got buried near the back of the section."

Hopeful pronouncements by Maliki don't seem to carry too much water anymore, as the Washington Post editors have come to realize. Consider his statement from last November:

“I can say that Iraqi forces will be ready, fully ready to receive this command and to command its own forces, and I can tell you that by next June our forces will be ready,” al-Maliki said in an interview with ABC News.

Um, yeah right.

arbotreeist, you may have noticed above that Cernig of Newshoggers, hardly a neocon by any stretch of the imagination and a pretty thoughtful blogger, also recognizes this story is an "A1" or "front page" claim. If you're willing to be honest, you'd also admit this.

Does Maliki's credibility matter here?

Yes.

It is precisely his dubious credibility and the potential for controversy that helps make this story ripe for a front page presentation.

>Agreed this claim should be front page, although I no more believe it than A-jad's claims of a gay-free nation.

Hey, it's not that there are any gay Iranians.... It's just that Iranians naturally have a wide stance when they're being executed.

> Hopeful pronouncements by Maliki don't seem to carry too much water anymore, as the Washington Post editors have come to realize.

So if he had instead come out saying that "Civil war in Iraq is still possible," the Washington Post would have still buried it?

Come on.

An interesting point for those bashing the Yankee for bashing the New York Times: the post was about the *Washington Post*.

Personally, I really enjoy watchdogging the press. All those J-school majors who want to 'change the world' must be disappointed that they don't have carte blanche anymore. I'd say that this is 25% of my enjoyment of reading the internet.

My most recent example was reading Sunday's paper in my town. In the front section, two stories about the changing racial demographic make up of two major cities (yawn) and the amazing story of the peruvian meteorite (?) that sickened a bunch of Peruvians. The latter had been reported on the internet 4 days before.

As for Maliki's credibility, I wasn't aware that credibility was a determiner of newsworthyness. That would have wiped Ahmedninijad out of the headlines entirely.

Not only did this not make front page news, but the very day after Ahmanuttajob did his thing at Columbia U., the NYT covered any number of ho-hum stories on the front page of Tuesday's paper but nary a word or pic on the biggest controversy of Monday (nationally and internationally). Talk about elephants in the room.

We're a lot smarter than the WaPo and NYT thinks or wants us to be.

Isn't this the same Al-Maliki that told us the Iraqi Army would be fully independent by 2007?

And his assessment is hardly what you'd call independent or objective.

What I don't understand is how you can keep moving the goalposts. It's like the past never happened. 6 months ago it was all about the 18 benchmarks - almost none of which were met. But somehow we're supposed to get excited because the leader of our client state claims the threat of civil war has ceased to exist, which is patently ridiculous when you consider all the sectarian violence that continues to occur.

And when they finally do get around to dividing the oil (who gets oil-rich Kirkuk?? the Kurds? The Shia?), that's when the threat of civil war really, REALLY looms large. So let's not all "Mission Accomplished" about this until the dust settles. There is no way that this comment belonged on p. 1.

Ooops - meant to say "get all 'Mission Accomplished' - but you know what I mean. :)

Sectarian violence (which is dramatically down) > civil war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_war#International_Definition

"Sanctions against a country the newspaper had to rename because most readers would not know what it was"

Uh... what? Oh... you'd rather call it what the dictator calls it.

Authoritarian impulses will do that to you...

Chuck, you wanna talk about moving goalposts? Okaaaaay...

What about all those Dems who, not all that long ago, were telling everyone that would listen that Bush should listen to the generals, and send more troops?

Well, he did, and he did. And things are turning around. And now the Dems are claiming that one of the generals that they wanted Bush to listen to is cooking the books.

Talk about moving goalposts...

re: "had to rename the country so readers would know what it was"...

To be fair, President Bush was referring to Myanmar as "Burma" in his speeches lately, including the one at the UN. I believe I read its in response to the fact that the military junta renamed the country when they took power, therefore its not legit.

The Post prints all sorts of stories and photos from Reuters and AP, and neither of those has any credibility whatsoever. So obviously, that doesn't explain squat. It's just one in a long procession of buried positive stories.

I would think that the clear stupidity or propaganda the Maliki comments represent would be a particularly good reason to bury them. They're obviously bull (particularly given the new assassination campaign), either intentionally or unintentionally, so why should they receive an A1 platform?

Wait - how could a civil war be averted when so many declared there already was one? Were they just hoping for one?

What page would Maliki's comments have been on if he had said Iraq was in an unwinnable civil war?

He is either credible or not.

If you bury comments you disagree with and promote comments you agree with then you are not objective.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell tells the Chamber of Commerce in Hershey that the surge isn't working.

http://www.pennlive.com/politics/article177841.ece

I'll have to pile on with the "renaming" comment. The only ones who renamed Burma were the murderous thugs who took it over in a coup. Official US policy has always been to continue to call the country "Burma." This has also consistently been the policy of the WaPo, the BBC, the British Government, and many, many other organizations. The Burmese dissidents, with whom we should continue to pledge solidarity, have always, and continue to, refer to their nation as Burma, ignoring the ridiculous and tribalist renaming done by the junta, apparently in a failed attempt to win popular nationalist support.

A few years ago, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ridiculed Bush's reference to "Burma," in a State of the Union Address, trying to cite this as another "Bush is so stupid" moment. (As if Bush, or any president, ever writes his own SOTU Address, or delivers a single line that hasn't been carefully vetted by the departments of Defense, State, and whatever else.) I wrote them a letter, pointing out their error; I don't want to be a hypocrite, so I have to point out yours, as well.

But let me hasten to add, otherwise, I agree with the main point of your post!

Actually, the Post is clearly showing its pro-Bush and pro-war bias by cleverly burying the story; if it were front-page news, people might realize that the Iraqi PM is a blind moron and support for the war would evaporate.

Damn conservative bias of the Post!

"What about all those Dems who, not all that long ago, were telling everyone that would listen that Bush should listen to the generals, and send more troops?"

Well, when you remove the generals that disagree with your policies (Abzaid and Casey had serious doubts about the surge) and replace them with a toady like Petraeus (see Admiral Fallon's comments about him) and Odierno I wouldn't exactly call that listening to the generals.

Arbotreeist, if General Petraeus is such a toady, why did the Senate, including Senators Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Kerry, vote to confirm him?

Toadyism isn't something that appears overnight, by the way, so please don't waste bandwidth with the "he wasn't a toady when they confirmed him" line. The man has served his nation for all of his adult life, surely evidence of toadyism would be prevalent by the time he got to his confirmation hearings.

Now, if you're gonna claim that it was there, well, then you're saying that the above-named Senators were uninformed about a man they were voting on, and that makes them look darned foolish.

So, you've just joined your fellow lefties in being hoist by your own petard. Congratulations, you get a DailyKos secret decoder ring!

"After all, American politics, foreign and domestic, are being driven by the actions and reactions of Democratic and Republican politicians to news in Iraq."

There's your mistake. Events on the ground stopped influencing influential Democratic politicians a long time ago, and until Baker/Hamilton put the political screws to Bush, I'm not so sure they were a defining factor for the Prez either. When actually following the troops day to day here at home (think WWII maps & flag pins) is the exception, not the rule, the news is just more or less conveniently spinnable material. The sectarian choas of '06, and the beatable civil war drum it supplied were like a freebie for the al-Qaeda-in-Iraq denyers. Civil war is now just as irrelevant as the previous beatification of Shinseki, and the formerly critical security based goalposts.

The only thing that's important on the political anti-war left is what feeds the mantra of preemptive failure. It's like a secular political version of predestination: What we've done has already failed, what we're doing now has already failed, and whatever we might do has already failed. What was once called self-fulfiiling prophecy has been recast as progressive realism, but it's still a faith based proposition. Indeed, the prophecy has already been fulfilled, Bush has already failed, and any assertion which conflicts with that self-evident, unalterable truth is just a lie that lying liars tell. General Betrayus had already lied before he opened his mouth; where outcomes have been ordained, there can be no optimists, only false prophets like Maliki.

Cynics always have the upper hand when it comes to predicting failure and creating I-told-you-so opportunities for themselves. There's a reason questions like "So, just how long are you willing to stay in Iraq?" proliferate. It's emblematic of a sublimely easy technique for adding notches to your ideological belt which Democrats have honed to near perfection: Demand unknowable guestimates on timing from every possible source and collect the most insanely optimistic projections from anybody who's remotely quotable; keep them handy, and you'll never be at a loss if you suddenly find yourself needing to cite a new and different broken "promise" in your litany of defeat. Don't neglect the little stuff. You can work a single, offhanded "cakewalk" for years with no "use by" date in sight.

If you can parlay some guestimates into an array of official benchmarks, you've got it made, because arbitrarily imposed timelines are virtually guaranteed to produce useful unmet objectives of one kind or another. The genius in that approach is that you can claim you're just looking to agree on a set of metrics for assessment and then ask for a progress report at the earliest negotiable date. You can even call it a preliminary report if you need to, because what it's called won't matter any more than what's in it. Once you've got that list, it's pass/fail, not progress, all the way the way home; you can beat almost any odds when you can stamp FAILED on everything from 0 to 99%.

The battle against cynicism, alas, is not just the hardest one to win, it's also the toughest on morale because you have to fight it in yourself, not just the other guy, as you go. It's not just politicians who seem to have lost the internal contest early on. Once that happens, it becomes increasingly difficult, psychologically, to acknowledge even the possibility that anyone who opposes you could actually be an idealist, because we like to think that our cynicism is the logical, inevitable, response to the circumstances we face, not a personal failing.

JM, I like your style. Bravo!

Thanks for the encouraging word C-C-G!

arbotreeist:

"Hopeful pronouncements by Maliki don't seem to carry too much water anymore, as the Washington Post editors have come to realize."

I think it's just as likely that a lot of the MSM will to pick up things like Grand Ayatollah Sistani breaking his notable silence to "appeal to Iraqi’s to 'forget their divisions'" and conveniently leave out Part Deux, where he says, a la Maliki,

“Be as a great mountain – he added – immoveable before the attempts of some media to attack our unity, exaggerating the number of the victims and speaking of confessional war”.