Clay Waters uncovered on Wednesday how The New York Times hyped Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. phone-hacking scandal by putting on the front page on four of eight days. Wednesday's story was aggressively touted "a damning report" from Parliament on Murdoch's British newspapers "convulsed Britain's political and media worlds." Four paragraphs later, they admitted the verdict that Murdoch was "not fit" for his empire was "split on party lines, six to four."
What struck me was then noticing this little blurb at the bottom of Page One: "Guilty Verdict in Subway Plot." A gaggle of British leftists declaring Murdoch "unfit" for his business was top-of-Page-One news, but a jury convicting a Muslim radical of plotting to blow up the subway underneath Grand Central station? Page A-19. In fact, the trial of Adis Medunjanin (heard of him?) never made the front page. This was the headline buried inside:
The Times could have just as easily used a headline like that for Rupert: "British Parliament Slams U.S. Citizen In Phone-Hacking Report."
Reporter Mosi Secret never used the M-word (Muslim) or the related I-words (Islam, Islamist) in his entire report, although they might think the references to al-Qaeda training camps are oblique enough to refer to the religion that shall remain nameless. The story began:
An American citizen was convicted of a host of terrorism charges on Tuesday for participating in a plot to stage suicide attacks in the New York subways, an effort that prosecutors said was stopped just days before three former high school classmates from Queens planned to set off homemade bombs during the rush period.
The trial was important enough for editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal to fulminate online against all the "cowardly" Republicans and Democrats who wouldn't try Khalid Sheikh Muhammad in New York when the Medunjanin trial was proceeding nicely:
There is no good reason to believe that the criminal justice system can handle an alleged terrorist who plotted to destroy the subway, but not an alleged terrorist who plotted to destroy the World Trade System. No good reason. The obvious bad reason is politics. Opposing the Mohammed trial was a publicity bonanza for tough-on-terrorism Republicans and a bipartisan group of cowardly members of the New York Congressional delegation.
Some might disagree and argue what's strangely "cowardly" is to imply by your news judgment that you think these terrorists are less dangerous (less likely to kill Americans?) than Rupert Murdoch.
