I meant for the Alex Newman article which I didn't see on the roughguidedarkside link but I could be blind too. I just found one on info clearing house and updated the link.
This, from your link, is interesting
Why I Made Stuff Up For The New York Times
This letter is based on
extracts from my memoir. For further heresies, see
here.
An Open Letter To The New CEO
By Daniel Simpson
Dear Mark,
Congratulations on your latest promotion. Who’d say no to the chance to run the
New York Times? When they headhunted me 10 years back, I thought I was made. OK, I was only their Balkans correspondent. I didn’t make $1 million, plus sign-on bonus. But I did think I’d joined the best newspaper in the world.
To
quote the former editor, Howell Raines:
“it misses the point to say that the Times is an ‘elite’ publication. It is the indispensable newsletter of the United States’ political, diplomatic, governmental, academic, and professional communities, and the main link between those communities and their counterparts around the world.”
This meant jump to heel and take dictation. When George W. Bush said: “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,” Times reporters opened up their notebooks. To prove they weren’t liberally biased against his government, they hyped its most blatant pro-war lies, and buried the facts that could have exposed them. The worst
offender was Judith Miller, who ran “scoops” on Saddam Hussein’s purported arsenal, sourced from Iraqi front groups and spooks. Smeared across the Times front page, these phony factoids spread like herpes.
...
I wasn’t supposed to report how people thought, but to explain how Western planners thought they should. Once a month, I was asked to write war porn from the 90s, when Yugoslavia was destroyed. “A lot of this is about picking the right situation,” an editor suggested. “A place of hideous atrocities, of course, but also a place where people had been quite friendly.” I begged victims to scratch their scabs so I’d look good.
I’d hit a mirrored ceiling in the media, and what I witnessed through the looking glass repulsed me. I was told to hold Serbs to account for supporting warmongers, while the Times helped enable the invasion of Iraq.
One year after The Day That Terrorists Changed Everything, the foreign editor sent a memo to his staff. “To judge by the President’s plans,” he
wrote, six months before the war, “the first half of next year may be busy.” So much for the cliched
vow: “without fear or favor”.
...
http://www.roughguidedarkside.com/2002/09/12/memo-foreign-editor-nytimes-cohen/
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