Australia rarely attracts much international attention, which is probably a good thing. For the last week or so, things have changed, though not for in a good way. First, there was the Downer-Zombietime fiasco, and then the death of Steve Irwin. Now our (intentional scare quotes) “national newspaper”, the Murdoch-owned Australian, has received international publicity for a report on global warming that (along with an editorial and additional coverage) adds new errors to the denialist case on global warming, while recycling many of the old ones.
Eric Umansky (via “Laura Rozen”:http://warandpiece.com/) has a great “article”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp in the CJR on how newspapers dealt with stories about torture and murder in Iraq. For example, this story about the _New York Times_.
Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.” Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”
Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.) “Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)