Inappropriate Content: C&R©

The New York Times reports today:

The top American weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles A. Duelfer, has wrapped up his work there, a step that ends the search for illicit weapons, an intelligence official said Tuesday night.

Mr. Duelfer issued a comprehensive report last fall that acknowledged that Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990's, years before the American invasion of 2003. But Mr. Duelfer returned to Iraq for further investigations after that report was issued. In an article in its Wednesday issue, The Washington Post reported that he had ended that work in late December.

The intelligence official said that Mr. Duelfer was still likely to issue several small additional statements on his findings, but that none would contradict the central conclusions that Iraq did not possess illicit weapons at the time of the American invasion.

President Bush and his top advisers had described what they said were illicit Iraqi arsenals as the central justification for going to war.

Mr. Duelfer, an adviser to the director of central intelligence, had overseen the work of the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,200-member military organization that carried out the work of searching for weapons, interviewing Iraqi officials and drawing up assessments.

That team remains in Iraq, but the main focus of its work shifted several months ago to efforts to combat the anti-American insurgency there.

So the demise of “the central justification for going to war” merits only six short paragraphs in the back of the A section. Some of the headlines that were father up the front page include:

But the really unfortunate thing is the above-the-fold front page coverage of the testimony of former Abu Gharib detainees. This is a
C&R story: controversy and ratings. Now, the liberal bias in the media is much discussed at The Bar. The conservatives often claim that the media help democrats and liberals. Well, if this is “helping,” I think I'd prefer to be smeared.

Look: in the back of the A section is a measly six paragraphs that report on the fact that the very agency Bush created to find WMD's in Iraq has found nothing, and admitted that “Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990's, years before the American invasion of 2003.” And now “the central justification for going to war” has been shown to be complete and utter bullshit, just like we've been saying all this time, and it's getting buried in the back of the A section! They didn't even bother getting the White House to try and spin this, because that would have eaten up valuable column inches that could be spent on Abu Gharib, which is something that President Bush's Secretary of Defense may be somewhat responsible for allowing to happen.

Well, I guess the readers of the New York Times needed their daily fix of simple, easy to digest tales of blood and suffering more than they needed anything that has to do with the repeated, substantive policy failures of the Bush administration. The problem with the media is not liberal bias. It's our national C&R addiction.

If it bleeds, it leads.