NY Times's Michael Gordon: War Propagandist

Recall the worst of Judy Miller's journalistic sins in the runup to the war in Iraq. Did you know that she often shared her byline with Michael Gordon?

Gordon continues to catapult the propaganda from the front page of the Times, only these days the villain is Iran. Glenn Greenwald has a post up dissecting Gordon's latest military press release.

It's long past time that Gordon followed Judy Miller into unemployment and obscurity. The man is an uncritical stenographer at best, a willful propagandist at worst. Plus, I'm sick of his scowling visage greeting me from the Times website.

Glenn Greenwald Hammers Bearded Turd Flat

Nothing gets under my skin like bad journalism. I wrote a book's worth of angry crank letters to the NYT in the run-up to the Iraq war and thereafter, enraged by shoddy reporting by Judy Miller, Michael Gordon, and others (what are you looking at, Elisabeth Bumiller?).

In the beginning, there was no Greenwald. But a couple of years ago he appeared in the blogosphere, an almost overnight sensation. I could easily link to the guy every day, he's that good.

Back today for another stint as punching bag is Time magazine's execrable Joe Klein, fake liberal and serial Bush administration fellatrix.

Greenwald's main point, which is maddeningly ignored by the news media:

That was one of the principal though-still-unlearned lessons of the Judy Miller Saga: when a journalist does nothing but mindlessly repeat the claims of government sources which are completely consistent with -- or designed to bolster -- the claims being made by the administration itself out in the open, the journalist is doing nothing more than turning himself into a willing propaganda tool. Again, what conceivable journalistic justification is there for granting anonymity to government sources to recite the Government Line?