A "HOMOPHOBIC INCIDENT"

A "homophobic incident" investigated by police. How come the New York Times is in full snit about wiretaps of conversations with known terrorists but thinks incidents like this and tracking the road use of every car in the U.K. is ho hum?

That was, of course, rhetorical. We all know why the New York Times does not find such intrusions alarming. To the New York Times, Yassir Arafat was a "romantic revolutionary" and Fidel Castro is a newsroom folk hero. Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize is still memorialized on the NYT walls and they, like CNN's defense of non-coverage of the brutality in Iraq, defend Duranty's dispatches, crediting the laspse to this day to the brutality of the regime they were supposedly covering. Duranty was a tool, a propaganda piece employed by the Soviet Union to conceal murderous purges that, even today, the New York Times cannot call genocide.

Duranty symbolizes everything that is wrong with the New York Times. And the Pulitzer prizes.