In addition to its well-known major papers, New York has several other varieties of daily fishwrap. One of them, The New York Sun was established in 2002 as a neoconservative broadsheet alternative to The New York Times.
Its circulation flagging, it has taken to foisting itself for free on unsuspecting New Yorkers. This morning I woke up to find it on my doorstep for the first time. Having watched Bush’s speech on Iraq last night on the troop “surge” for Iraq, I wondered what it would say about the story.
It’s headline: BUSH WARNS IRANIANS
The beginning of the article entirely ignored the thrust of Bush’s speech, that we had made errors in our Iraq strategy and that we were sending in additional troops, and focused on the fact that in a small corner of the speech said that the new strategy would include interrupting Iranian support of Iraqi insurgents. From this it concluded, in the article’s first two paragraphs:
The surge in troop levels wasn’t mentioned until the fourth paragraph, after which it was quickly dropped in the midst of reporting that the modified strategy was a rejection of the advice of General John Abazaid. The article virtually ignores Bush’s acceptance of responsibility (ambiguious as it may have been) and the important (and questionable) need for Iraqi government cooperation in the plan. The rest of the article twists and turns to avoid giving the pertinent parts of the speech.
Just glancing at the reporting made me seriously question the Sun as a journalistic entity. In other words, it was a total “What the Fuck?” moment. Reading the most aggressively spun bit of supposedly objective news reporting that I’ve ever seen isn’t exactly the way to make me subscribe. Even if I leaned your way politically, the sheer non-credibility of this story would prevent me from believing any supposedly straight news you presented.