George Costanza knows shrinkage!
Posted on 07/19/2006 6:13:57 AM PDT by abb
somewhat related...
U.N. Drama Unfolds,
Times Runs Wire Copy
By: Niall Stanage
Date: 7/24/2006
Page: 10
The story had everything: secret agents, political intrigue, personal betrayal and cash. Lots and lots of cash.
Yet, for all that, a remarkable trial that ended last week in a Manhattan courtroom—a proceeding that implicated figures in the highest echelons of international politics—was barely mentioned in the major American press. If it weren’t for the journalistic wing of the conservative movement, outlets like the National Review Online and The New York Sun, it might not have been covered at all.
Take the events of last Thursday, for example. After two weeks of testimony, a jury took only a few hours to convict a South Korean national, Tongsun Park, of acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The conspiracy of which he was a part ran for 10 years, ending in late 2002, and helped one of the world’s worst regimes maintain its grip on power.
But The New York Times did not assign a reporter to his trial, its total coverage amounting to a brief wire report on the day following Mr. Park’s conviction. Of the other major national dailies, The Washington Post ran a single news-brief item, the Los Angeles Times not a word.
Given the stakes—and what the Park trial clearly demonstrated about the seamier side of the U.N.—it hardly made sense.
The most innocent explanation is that the major newspapers had simply moved on to other things, frustrated by the apparent complexity and opacity of the oil-for-food scandal, of which the Korean fixer is only one colorful part.
But some critics contend there may have been another factor: a combination of sullenness and embarrassment on the part of what bloggers gleefully disdain as “the mainstream media.”
“The oil-for-food story began on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. The U.N. denied it had done anything wrong for the longest time, and most of the press followed its lead,” said James Bone, New York correspondent of The Times of London. “Many of the major newspapers came to the story late and are embarrassed by it.”
(Mr. Bone covered the trial via his own blog, entitled UN Eyes Only, which is carried on his newspaper’s Web site.)
As it turns out, many of the accusations made by the right-wing publications and polemicists who have covered the scandal since the beginning—and who oppose the U.N. on ideological grounds as a meddlesome instrument of global big government—have been accurate.
The U.N. is compromised. It is open to corruption. And it did enjoy a curious and sometimes cozy relationship with the Baghdad regime.
Naturally enough, major American newspapers defend themselves vigorously from criticisms of their coverage.
The New York Times’ foreign editor, Susan Chira, said in an e-mail, “There is absolutely no ideological agenda about the coverage of the oil-for-food trial.”
The U.N. set up the program ostensibly to alleviate the suffering of Iraq’s civilian population under sanctions. Saddam Hussein was permitted to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy humanitarian and medical supplies.
But the program left too many decisions—like to whom they would sell the oil—in the hands of the Iraqi regime. Mr. Hussein and his aides received millions of dollars in kickbacks and wound up enriched and entrenched in power as a result.
The trial of Tongsun Park was one of the first oil-for-food cases to come before a U.S. court. And it revealed for the first time the depth of the chicanery that took place even as the program was being formulated.
During the trial, Mr. Park’s co-conspirator, Samir Vincent, now a cooperating witness on behalf of the government, said he considered himself and Mr. Park “the architects” of U.N. Resolution 986, which set up the oil-for-food program. Both men, it bears repeating, have now been proven to be undeclared Iraqi agents.
The prosecution’s case rested almost exclusively on the story Mr. Vincent had to tell. But what a story it was.
He testified that during a 1996 meeting, Mr. Park asked him for $10 million “to take care of expenses and to take care of some people.” Mr. Vincent understood “some people” to be a reference to the U.N. Secretary General of the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
A version of Mr. Park’s remarkable request was acceded to by Baghdad. Soon, Mr. Vincent found himself in his native country’s oil ministry, being presented with $450,000 in bundles of $100 bills.
The day after his return to the U.S., he handed $100,000 over to Mr. Park in an unnamed Manhattan coffee shop. Two further payments—of $400,000 and $500,000—were made by him to Mr. Park from Iraqi funds, he said.
One document that surfaced at the trial purported to record Mr. Boutros-Ghali expressing regret to the Iraqis that he had been unable to “neutralize” the then chief weapons inspector of the U.N., Rolf Ekéus.
Another of Mr. Vincent’s notes bore a message allegedly to be sent to Mr. Boutros-Ghali through Tongsun Park: “Iraq very appreciative of what he has done and future deals will be even sweeter.”
Mr. Boutros-Ghali denies any wrongdoing whatsoever.
The episodes described during the trial involve the U.N.’s present as well as its past.
Maurice Strong was current Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy to North Korea until the oil-for-food scandal began to lap around his feet last year.
Fresh details about a check for almost $1 million that Mr. Strong was given by Mr. Park emerged at the trial. The court also heard evidence that Mr. Park covered Mr. Strong’s private office expenses for several years.
Mr. Strong, like Mr. Boutros-Ghali, denies any wrongdoing. But, at the least, it is odd that people at the very highest level of the U.N. enjoyed such a close relationship with Mr. Park.
(Three decades prior to his current travails, Mr. Park was caught up in the so-called Koreagate scandal, accused of trying to buy support for South Korea in Congress and eventually testifying in exchange for immunity.)
During the course of the legal proceedings, these puzzling transactions have been laid bare—for anyone interested enough to write about them.
“This case was fascinating to me because it showed the diplomacy we never see,” said Benny Avni, who covered the trial for The New York Sun. “It showed the dirty diplomacy, what is going on behind the striped suits. It showed where the striped suits were being laundered.”
To Mr. Avni, the lack of major media coverage was symptomatic of a lack of interest among many in the press corps in looking too deeply at the U.N.’s failings.
Correspondents with major newspapers, however, bridle at the suggestion that there is anything timid about their coverage of the institution. While noting only that it “wasn’t my decision” not to send a reporter to cover the Park trial, Warren Hoge, The New York Times’ U.N. correspondent, insisted that his paper had been vigorous in its reporting of the oil-for-food story.
“The evidence I can give you is the amount of space we gave it,” he said. “It was page 1 always; it had great space. Just look at the copy. There is not a single suggestion that The New York Times went softly on this story.”
The Times’ early coverage of the oil-for-food program, though, was largely driven by one of its most controversial reporters, Judith Miller. A search of The Times’ online archive up to the date on which Ms. Miller’s final pre-imprisonment article was published yields 54 matches for the terms “oil-for-food” and “Judith Miller,” and 45 for “oil-for-food” and “Warren Hoge.” A LexisNexis search up to the same date showed that 237 New York Sun articles mentioned oil-for-food and that 101 of them were written in whole or part by Mr. Avni.
In the course of emphasizing the toughness of The Times’ coverage, Mr. Hoge also added, “There are some newspapers that do that with a distinct editorial slant. We didn’t do that because we don’t do that.”
Mr. Avni, of The Sun, replied that the U.N. coverage pointed up the advantages of an agenda-driven take on the matter. “If an ideological agenda is shedding some light on some shady and improper business, then good,” he said.
Mr. Avni, declining to “name names,” also recalled a conversation he said he’d had with a Times reporter some months back:
“I said to him, ‘We are covering the U.N. much more aggressively than you are.’ And he said, ‘Right, but we are covering the Bush administration much more aggressively than you are.’ We find faults where we are looking for faults, and they want to find faults where they are looking for faults.”
Claudia Rosett, a former member of The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board, is now a freelance journalist who has become an authority on the oil-for-food scandal. She blogged the Park trial for National Review Online. She contended that emphasis on the ideological affiliations of the media that have covered the story most effectively is, ultimately, detrimental—because it can too easily divert attention from the scandal itself.
“The criticisms we’ve been hearing about the U.N. would have no traction if they were not grounded in fact,” she said. “The reason this has become a scandal is that the accusations have been proven true.”
copyright © 2005 the new york observer, L.P. | all rights reserved
Make it the width of toilet paper and put it on a roll...
Rules...
Worth repeating....
“This is a business that is in utter panic,”
I think I need to ping this one...
George Costanza knows shrinkage!
Eight more cuts just like that would be wonderful.
Citing “flabby or redundant prose” in the paper’s current form, Mr. Keller declared, "I believe our readers will find our conversion to New Speak ++good."
The basic concept of "fixed-format" news reporting is an anachronism in the modern world of advanced communications. There's simply no way to "break" a story on the front page of a newspaper, and newspaper stories by definition are old news the moment they hit the printing presses.
Eventually, the only newspapers to survive will be those that can successfully transform from a "news" format to an "insight/opinion/commentary" format. Newspapers already do this in their sports pages. The difference between an exceptional sports section and an average one is not in the factual information provided (they are reporting on the same things, and pretty much presenting the same facts) . . . it is in the quality of insight and commentary in the exceptional one.
HE WAS IN THE POOOOOOL!
As Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has titled one of his books, "BRING ME THE HEAD OF WILLY THE MAILBOY". While those responsible for the slow death spiral of the gray lady continue to indulge themselves, "the innocent are dragged out and shot". (that was the title of an editorial in Machine Design magazine but i can't remember the author's name.)
New Media reporters such as Michael Yon already provide me with "insight/opinion/commentary". The Inet enables Yon and his ilk to virtually eliminate production and overhead costs while offering an interactive multimedia experience orders of magnitude better than the 400 year old fishwrap experience.
Not an exceptional paper, just an exceptional editorial page.
Only reason I buy it . . .
So, the Sunday Times will get even bigger!
Bigger paper means bigger price.
"Classic example: The Wall Street Journal.
Not an exceptional paper, just an exceptional editorial page."
Disagree. I'm a 40-year buyer/subscriber of newspapers, and I'm now down to the Journal. I think it's impeccably produced--written, researched, edited. It leans conservative, yes, but it keeps that on the editorial page. Everything else is as well-done as anything in today's print press, and far, far better than most. It's not unfair to say that the Times's left-bias has insidiously taken over virtually every department of the paper, so reading even a sports story leaves one with the unpleasant feeling that one is trying to be manipulated and/or controlled. Which is why I left the Times behind forever.
If a few thousand freepers did this simple action this week and a few thousand new freepers, friends and relatives each following week, we will have a terminal impact on the NY Slimes acts of sedition. Please send this how to your blogs, friends, relatives and email lists. This action will serve as a cannon shot across the bows fo the other Dinosaur Liberal Fish Wraps re sedition will not be tolerated any more.
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Want to smash the NY Slimes?
How many of us own mutual funds which own NY Slimes stock and even worse have increased their NYT holdings this year. NYT investment by a mutual fund company is a terrible investment re the dollar loss in Stock value the last 2 years. Those investments are an attempt to keep the NY Slimes afloat with our mutual fund $'s. Now it is very evident that the NY Slimes is an agent and abettor of the al Qaeda Serial Killers. The Slimes is endangering the lives of our families, friends, innocent Americans and every warrior of ours. Go to this link to see if your mutual fund owns NYT. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/ownership/ownership.asp When the MS Money stock home page comes up, enter NYT into the search area and hit enter and the following screen will show up re ownership of the NY Slimes stock: The New York Times Company: Ownership Information
Highlight the Mutual Fund Ownership and hit enter. If thousands of Freepers, whose mutual funds own shares of NY Slimes did the following:
We might have a lot more impact than trying to boycott companies which sell to the elite liberals of NYC and advertise in the NY Slimes. |
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