Tuesday, February 15, 2005

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Aren't we past this?

YOU ARE VISITING THE OLD MALKIN(S)WATCH. THAT'S FANTASTIC. PLEASE VISIT THE NEW MALKIN(S)WATCH WHEN YOU GET A CHANCE.
I guess not...
The Los Angeles Times runs a lame correction regarding its Eason Jordan coverage...What is the point of running a correction if the correction is as bad as the original error?
She links to Patterico's Pontifications:
The L.A. Times story on Eason Jordan’s resignation had this absurd paragraph:

While at CNN, Jordan also had provoked many activists and critics in an April 2003 opinion piece in the New York Times. Jordan asserted that he sometimes could not allow his network to report all it had learned during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy.
So there appears to be a big mistake there. His focus was not just "the intense early days of combat", rather the entire length of Saddam's regime. Jordan's op-ed:
For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.
So that's worth correcting, right? That must be what Malkin and others are complaining about. Back to Patterico:
Ha! Power Line reports that alert L.A. Times reader Diana Magrann wrote the "Readers' Representative" to suggest a more accurate version of reality:

In April 2003, Jordan admitted in a New York Times opinion piece that CNN had withheld knowledge of numerous instances of Saddam’s brutality in order to maintain access.
Maintain access? There is nothing in the op-ed to suggest this. Nothing any any of the "supporting links", such as this one, except assumption and innuendo. It's certainly possible that the righties' interpretation is correct, but I see no evidence presented.

So did the LA Times run a correction? Why, yes.
...Jordan wrote that he did not allow his network to report all it had learned "during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy." Jordan’s essay was about his network’s coverage in the years preceding the war as well as in the early days of the war.


Instead of the bolded language, what was wrong with Diana Magrann’s language? This way, even with the correction, L.A. Times readers never learn about the scandal of Jordan’s decision to cover up Saddam’s brutality in order to keep a CNN bureau in Baghdad. That can’t be the right way to handle this correction.
What's wrong with the language? You haven't provided any evidence for what's right with it.