New York Times Buries the Lead — Deliberately — on Egypt Story

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Yesterday, the New York Times put a story on its Web site with the headline: “Christians Targeted for Retribution in Egypt.” Then, evidently, the editors took over and turned it into a story headlined: “Egypt Calls for New Look at Morsi Prison Escape in 2011.”

As they say in the newsroom, they added a new top, and what had been the lead of the story became the B-matter.

While working on something else yesterday afternoon, I saw the headline at Memeorandum (which aggregated it at 5:45 p.m. ET) and made a mental note to blog about it later, but when I checked again this morning, the entire story had been changed.

The elements of the original story about the persecution of Christians by Muslims — 14 paragraphs, 445 words  — has been shoved to the bottom of the story and a new top — 12 paragraphs, 545 words — has been added. Here’s the original lead, accidentally preserved by Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway who linked the story yesterday:

CAIRO — The military’s ouster of President Mohamed Morsi has unleashed a new wave of violence by extremist Muslims against Christians whom they blame for having supported the calls to overthrow Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first Islamist elected leader, according to rights activists.

And here is the new lead:

CAIRO — Egypt’s new rulers gave new credence to a court case against the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday over their escape from prison during the uprising that toppled his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.

On what planet is this second story more newsworthy — more interesting, more readable, more important — than the first?

Answer: Not on planet Earth, buster.

Never mind anything about politics. This is simply a matter of news judgment. “Extremists Unleash Wave of Violence Against Christians” is the kind of headline that sells newspapers. And instead we get some gobbledygook about what happened in 2011?

You suck, New York Times editors.

 

45 comments

  2. The most important part of this story to me is how the Egyptian military reasserted control. I hope they keep on doing so, as “democracy” in Muslim countries is never going to amount to more than mob rule. A truly Republican form of government is beyond their comprehension, let alone attainment.

  3. Sort of like NBC editing Zimmerman’s 911call initially to make him seem more racist.

    Or like the New York Times not ringing alarms in WWII over the Holocaust. History does repeat itself…

  4. For cases like this I reverse the old rule of thumb “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”: they don’t suck, they’re deliberately being evil.

  5. Indeed. Their societies are stuck in the 7th Century. For that reason, I was not enthused about Bush II’s “nation building” efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Better to use the 19th century US Navy approach to foreigners who ticked us off, defined by Max Boot as, “Butcher and Bolt.”

  8. This is the NYT. Folks there are afraid that if they report the truth, they may lose important body parts.

  12. Exactly; they missed the entire holocaust. I guess they must have had more interesting stories to tell..

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