The Record of the Paper: How the 'New York Times' Misreports US Foreign Policy - Tapa dura

Howard Friel is founder and president of Differentiated Information, Inc., an information services company (www.diffinfo.net), and is the author of Dogs of War: The Wall Street Journal and the Right-Wing Campaign Against International Law, 2005. Richard Falk was the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University, and since 2002 has been Visiting Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most recent books include Unlocking the Middle East and The Great Terror War.

the 1954 Geneva Accords on Vietnam to Iraq today - has failed to incorporate international law into its coverage of US foreign policy. This lapse, as the authors demonstrate, has had profound implications for the quality of the Times' journalism and the function of the press in a country supposedly governed by the rule of law. In this meticulously researched study, Howard Friel and Richard Faulk reveal how the Times has consistently misreported major US foreign policy issues, including the bombing of North Vietnam in response to the Tonkin Gulf and Pleiku incidents in 1964-65, the Reagan administration's policy toward the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's elected president, and the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq. In their analysis of the Times' coverage of Iraq, the authors analyze the specious legal rand policy arguments given to support the invasion, the claims of Iraqi WMD, the Times' use of Ahmed Chalabi, the US cluster-bombing of Baghdad and the Iraqi town of Hilla, and a lengthy New York Times Magazine cover story that appeared to advocate the abuse and inhumane treatment of detainees that was published just as the Abu Ghraib story was breaking. Friel and Falk's eloquent and damning book concludes by proposing an alternative editorial policy that incorporates international law into the Times' coverage of US foreign policy, which, they argue, would improve the news and editorial products and the Times while aligning its editorial mission with the defense of constitutionalism and the rule of law in the United States.