New York Times Downplays Attacks, Death of Ambassador
When totalitarian Islamists killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens (pictured above) and three other Americans in Libya and stormed the embassy in Egypt, The New York Times put the story on page A4. Apparently, the death of a U.S. diplomat, the storming of an embassy and the invasion of a consulate is not worthy of front-page coverage.
This caught the attention of Newsbusters, which joked that the paper is not printing all the news fit to print, but all the news “fit to downplay.” Dan Drezner asks in a tweet (also highlighted at Newsbusters) “How in the hell do the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi not make the front page of the New York Times? #pageA4? #really?”
This question becomes more salient when in light of The Times coverage of the arrest of five Israeli Jews for the beating of an Israeli Arab in Jerusalem on Aug. 16, 2012. When the arrest took place the New York Times put this story on the front page on Aug. 21, 2012. A few days later, it published a page 3 story on how the beating highlights problems in Israeli society.
Why is a beating in Jerusalem more worthy of our attention than the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the death of a U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans? Under international law, embassies are the sovereign territory of the countries that own them. Attacks on embassies are by their very nature, acts of war.
How is this not front-page coverage?
Sept. 21, 2012 Update
Several respondents in the comments posted below report that their editions of the Sept. 12, 2012 New York Times did include front page stories about the attacks on American diplomatic interests in Egypt and Libya.
CAMERA’s did not and the Nexis-Lexis archive states that the article appeared on page A4 of the paper.
It is important to note that the Washington Post’s first story about the attacks appeared on page A10 and the Wall Street Journal’s first story about the attacks appeared on page A8 of that paper.
The NYT’s placement seems most noteworthy because the newspaper has a history of of a striking double-standards and questionable judgment when it comes to what is featured on its front page and what is relegated to its back pages.
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