Someone at the New York Times forgot where the opinion pages are, and not for the first time. When it comes to hot-button foreign issues such as Russia and Syria, too often Official Washington’s opinions and hostile spin get propagated as fact on its news pages.
Consider the Sept. 30 edition of the Times and its contrasting coverage of U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and Russian bombing in Syria. On Afghanistan, the paper’s approach is factual: The Times story leads with “American warplanes bombarded Taliban-held territory around the Kunduz airport overnight, and Afghan officials said American Special Forces were rushed toward the fighting.” Lacking much depth, the article does not address, much less question, U.S. motives, which by implication are simply to help beleaguered government forces resist Taliban advances in Kunduz and northern Afghanistan.
In contrast, the main Times story on Russia’s first bombing raids in Syria leads with an assumption of Russian motives related as fact: “President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia suddenly escalated the stakes in his contest with the West over influence in the Middle East on Wednesday, as Russian pilots carried out their first airstrikes in Syria.” Not until the fourth paragraph do we find that Moscow claims that its goal is to “fight Islamic State militants.”
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