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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-06-22

Like An Epilogue Without A Story UPDATED

Wednesday morning's Rocky Mountain News carries the story of Dick Durbin's (non-)apology on the floor of the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. Actually, it just carries the AP version, but whatever. . .

Under fire from Republicans and some fellow Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin apologized Tuesday for comparing American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to Nazis and other historically infamous figures.

"Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line," the Illinois Democrat said. "To them I extend my heartfelt apologies."

What strikes me as funny about this story is that if you do a site search of the Rocky Mountain News, using the words "Dick Durbin Guantanamo Bay" (I tried to be as broad as I could) you get ZERO hits. Actually, not true--you get the one editorial from over the weekend, but you get zero reporting of the original incident.

A quick search of the Denver Post website turns up the same thing--zero references to the original Senate speech. The Wednesday edition is not available online yet, so it will be very interesting to see if the Post pulls the same act.

The point is that without the context of the original speech, the calls for an apology at the time and subsequently, and the week-long stonewalling by Durbin, Average Joe reading the paper will look at the headline, maybe read the first few paragraphs, and say to themselves "okay. No biggie--what's next?" When in reality, of course, this IS BIG, and Durbin did a nice job playing it out for as long as he could. The MSM is complicit in hiding the full story of this outrage, and that, more than anything they actually say or that Dan Rather tries to get away with, reveals the bias that has enable the explosion of this new medium.

And until the MSM understands that, it will continue to be the target of much ire.

UPDATE: As near as I can tell from its website, the Denver Post is not running the story this morning of Durbin's apology. If anybody actually gets the Post (which I do not), and has seen the story, please let me know.

If this is the case, then at least the Post is consisitent in its coverup.
Posted by: Michael / 6/22/2005 12:36:00 AM

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