In this case, instead of "all the news that's fit to print," it's all the news that's fit to downplay.
While relegating news of the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the American Consulate in Behghazi, Libya to Page A4, today's New York Times placed the following stories on the front page of its New York and National editions (HT Daniel Drezner via Instapundit):
"Israeli Sharpens Call for United States to Set Iran Trigger"
"Teachers’ Leader in Chicago Strike Shows Her Edge"
"Gay Marriage Vote Rises as Test in Upstate G.O.P. Race" (Note now a race for State Senator is considered important national news.)
"Dissecting Romney’s Vietnam Stance at Stanford" (words fail)
"Amazon, Forced to Collect a Tax, Is Adding Roots"
"Get Out of Jail Free? No, It's Better" (perhaps indicating how embarrassed it is about letting that headline go through, the listing of front-page contents on the web has the story's headline as "Whistle-Blower Awarded $104 Million by I.R.S.")
David D. Kirkpatrick's coverage at Page A4, with the help of Suliman Ali Zway in Tripoli, almost seems to excuse the violence (bolds are mine; links are in original):
Anger Over a Film Fuels Anti-American Attacks in Libya and Egypt
Protesters angry over an amateurish American-made video denouncing Islam attacked the United States Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Tuesday, killing a State Department officer, while Egyptian demonstrators stormed over the fortified walls of the United States Embassy here.
On the 11th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the assaults were a violent reminder that the changes sweeping the region have hardly dispelled the rage against the United States that still smolders in pockets around the Arab world.
The mobs were set off by Egyptian media reports about a 14-minute trailer for the video, called “Innocence of Muslims,” that was released on the Web. The trailer opens with scenes of Egyptian security forces standing idle as Muslims pillage and burn the homes of Egyptian Christians. Then it cuts to cartoonish scenes depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a child of uncertain parentage, a buffoon, a womanizer, a homosexual, a child molester and a greedy, bloodthirsty thug.
The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by Sam Bacile, whom The Wall Street Journal Web site identified as a 52-year old Israeli-American real estate developer in California. He told the Web site he had raised $5 million from 100 Jewish donors to make the film. “Islam is a cancer,” Mr. Bacile was quoted as saying.
The video gained international attention when a Florida pastor began promoting it along with his own proclamation of Sept. 11 as “International Judge Muhammad Day.”
In a statement on Tuesday, the pastor, Terry Jones of Gainesville, Fla., called the film “an American production, not designed to attack Muslims but to show the destructive ideology of Islam” and said it “further reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad.”
... The death in Benghazi appears to be the first such fatality in a string of attacks and vandalism against foreign and especially Western diplomatic missions in Libya in recent months. Since the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s transitional government has struggled to rebuild an effective police force, control the weapons that have flooded the streets and restore public security.
Those poor rioters, they can't help themselves. When someone offends their religion, they simply must respond, just as Christians rioted over the "art" of "P*ss Christ" and the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung (with the exhibit subsidized by tax dollars). Oh wait, those Christian riots never happened.
An American at the State Department is dead and rioters attack our supposedly soverereign diplomatic space in two separate countries for the same ostensible reason. But what Mitt Romney did and didn't do about Vietnam forty-plus years ago and one state senator's gay marriage vote are far more important. Zheesh.
Drezner's tweet asks: "How in the hell do the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi not make the front page of the New York Times? #pageA4? #really?"
Yeah, really. It must be painful for the Times to watch the "Arab Spring" myth fostered by the Obama administration and its willing accomplices in the press get exposed for the lie it has always been -- and for Dear Leader to see it fall apart before instead of after the presidential election.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
