Realizing that there will be less bad news from Afghanistan in the coming days, the New York Times seems more inclined now to cover for Joe Biden. At least that’s the sense I get from this report by my friend who is following the Times’ coverage of the debacle:
Even as NYT catalogues important aspects of the Afghanistan disaster, it covers for Biden’s worst failures. The Americans left behind are barely mentioned. A passing reference toward the end of a very long story is all we get. We’re told that, “a number of Americans, thought to be fewer than 300, remain, either by choice or because they were unable to reach the airport.”
We get in-depth coverage of Afghans left behind, including the sad story of stranded students from the American University of Afghanistan. So, why is there no story dedicated to the stranded Americans, the shifting and perhaps unreliable numbers provided by the administration, and, above all, Biden’s broken promise to stay until all American citizens are safely evacuated?
Even Bret Stephens, who savages Biden in a long dialogue with Gail Collins on the Op-Ed page, says nothing about the American citizens left behind. Collins, by the way, offers no defense of Biden. On the contrary, she predicts that he’ll be more honest about his mistakes in time.
Is NYT being honest about Biden’s mistakes right now?
A front-page news analysis by Thomas Gibbons-Neff works to pin the blame on Trump, while passing over nearly every questionable decision by Biden. NYT has little to say of the vast American arsenal left behind for the Taliban. Readers of the Times will undoubtedly come away convinced that our exit from Afghanistan has been a disaster. Nonetheless, the most egregious features of the fiasco remain largely hidden from view.
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