Throttling the Life from the Republican Fourth Estate

There's a lovely moment in an early Bob Dylan song where Dylan, playing the role of the hobo troubadour in the style of Woody Guthrie, is talking about the freezing winter weather. The New York Times, so the song goes, said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years. Having heard that from the Times, Dylan's character drolly observes, he no longer felt so cold.

The old adage about not believing what's printed in the New York Times was revived during the war on terror, not least by the spectacle of the Times itself publicly apologising, in May 2004, for its coverage of the lead-up to war in Iraq. The paper acknowledged falling for ‘official gullibility and hype’ in its coverage of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction capabilities. ‘In some cases’, the 26 May editorial said, ‘information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged – or failed to emerge’ (New York Times 2004). It wasn't the raciest mea culpa of the war, and the paper hedged its apology by transferring at least some of the blame to its sources; but from the New York Times this was heady stuff, reflecting Media Studies commentary that was often highly critical of corporate American news outlets after 9/11.