All the News That Fits Our Agenda™

You'd have thunk that Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman's statements this week reporting on progress in Iraq and calling for the US to stay the course would have been mentioned by the NYT. But you'd have been wrong! (The only mention of Lieberman's comments found in a search on the NYT's website came in the last two paragraphs of a Reuters wire service piece that never made it into the dead tree edition.) In the NYT's alternative universe (what is the opposite of Bushworld?) this counts as UnNews. Double plus ungood.

For the record, here is what Lieberman had to say about Iraq in his WSJ OpEd yesterday:

I have just returned from my fourth trip to Iraq in the past 17 months and can report real progress there. More work needs to be done, of course, but the Iraqi people are in reach of a watershed transformation from the primitive, killing tyranny of Saddam to modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood--unless the great American military that has given them and us this unexpected opportunity is prematurely withdrawn.

Progress is visible and practical. In the Kurdish North, there is continuing security and growing prosperity. The primarily Shiite South remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity. The Sunni triangle, geographically defined by Baghdad to the east, Tikrit to the north and Ramadi to the west, is where most of the terrorist enemy attacks occur. And yet here, too, there is progress.

Contrast the NYT's treatment of Sen. Lieberman's comments with those of Congressman John Murtha.

What is really annoying about the NYT is that unlike other major US newspapers (like the WSJ, WaPo or even the liberal LAT), the Times makes no attempt at presenting an even-handed review of the day's news. Entire controversies that gain extensive coverage elsewhere (like UNscam, for example) are consigned to the NYT's memory hole as not being newsworthy. All I can say is thank god for the Internet. If people actually had to rely on the one-time "newspaper of record" for their news, they would be sadly misunderinformed (as President Bush might have put it).