Media Research Center has The Ten Worst Media Distortions of Campaign 2004
Via Let It Bleed this is a must read roundup of the attempts made in the US major media to spin election coverage and commentary in Kerry’s favour. Relevant to a post from a couple of days ago, scroll down to check out the chart showing the ration of bad to good stories during the Clinton administration and coverage of the US economy today.
(Now – in the interest of balance – I’m sure there is a Top Ten of Kerry distortions somewhere out there, but something tells me that in 9 of them, a football will be involved.)

Thomas Friedman in the New York Times….

“When the world liked Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, America had more power in the world“

James Joyner is perplexed.

When exactly was it that the world liked Ronald Reagan? Certainly, not while he was in office. Remember all the protests about his plan to put Pershing II’s into Europe? The controversy over Star Wars? The business about him being a stupid cowboy?
Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was wildly popular in Europe. But how exactly did that translate into U.S. power? He was unable to secure UN backing for Kosovo and a myriad of other military operations, having instead to go it alone or with coalitions of the willing. The good will toward Clinton didn’t exactly translate into freedom from terrorism, either, as al Qaeda formed and perpetrated numerous attacks on American targets under his watch.

Ahistoricism isn’t just a symptom of Bush derangement syndrome – it’s a prerequisite. Much of the core criticism of Bush’s foreign policy absolutely hinges upon ignorance – or intentional misrepresentation – of past events. Indeed, it isn’t even that uncommon for critics to move events that occured in the Clinton administration through time to attribute them to Bush, if they think it will help their case.
Case in point: the current meme that unemployment rates under Bush are “high”, placed against a backdrop of Clinton prosperity and full employment. In fact, the unemployment rates in the US today are nearly identical to those under Clinton.
The same phenomenon occured under the dearly departed – and only recently beloved – Ronald Reagan. Under the heavily scorned “Reaganomics” plan, average income for the lowest one-fifth of Americans rose from $7,008 to $9431, inflation fell 48%, unemployment fell 45%, interest rates declined from 21% to under 6% . 21 million new jobs were created.
The only economic indicators that weren’t affected was press coverage. Negative stories on the economic performance of the Reagan adminstration outnumbered the postive by a ration of seven to one.*
[*source- L. Brent Bozell III, Media Research Center, in Imprimis Nov. 1994]

It turns out that the New York Times was let off easy on the Al Qaaqaa fiasco. CBS was trying to hold the Bush-damaging story in order to run it in the final hours of the campaign – when there would be insufficient time to present the facts – but the Times broke it. The initial explanation was journalistic “competitiveness”.
Except they weren’t competing with CBS. They too, had planned to hold it for Monday publication – until it began to leak into the blogosphere. According to the Washington Post, their hand was forced.

On Sunday night, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller told Jeff Fager, executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” that the story they had been jointly pursuing on missing Iraqi ammunition was starting to leak on the Internet.
“You know what? We’re going to have to run it Monday,” Keller said.

Bill at INDC has the Russian angle covered (including possible connections to the “caught in the crossfire” incident involving Russian “diplomats), while Wizbang is providing updates and asking for assistance in exploring the discrepencies between the original IAEA inspections and their subsequent reports.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing – presumably stolen due to a lack of security – was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.
But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility – a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

More at Instapundit, while Powerline is covering the follow-up “reporting” by the Times and finds they are still working hard to salvage/spin this story.

Once again, the Times appears to be the only news organization in America that doesn’t know that the 101st Airborne merely passed through Al Qaqaa on the way to Baghdad without searching the site. It was the 3rd ID, which reached Al QaQaa six days earlier, that knew the site needed to be searched, and did, indeed, search it. Can the Times really be this inept? I don’t think so. I think it’s deliberate. No newspaper could be this bad accidentally.