The New York Times
Shortly after the Times published Matt Bai’s story on the personal struggles of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter since being vindicated for his opposition to the Iraq War, conservatives Liz Cheney and John Podhoretz seized on just a few words from a contextual paragraph:
As the last American troops left Iraq, it’s fair to say that the war and the debate that surrounded it produced few real heroes; rather, it served as a kind of vortex of destruction that sucked in and defiled nearly everyone associated with it. In Ritter’s case, the public vindication to which he would seem entitled — and which he has never quite received — has now been replaced by a very public disgrace, his life having slowly come undone in the years after the invasion.
Podhoretz’s response: “Oh, @MattBai, you are about to be in a deluge, having written there were ‘few real heroes’ in the Iraq war. Apologize now. Fix it now. Liz Cheney’s: “Typical NYTimes view of the world: @MattBai: Iraq war produced ‘few real heroes.’ Let him know how wrong he is.”
Bai writes that he could have written something more specific to make clear that he was referring to national leaders, not soldiers, but he doubts that it would have mattered.
We live in a moment where it’s generally not enough for one political faction or another to express honest disagreement with a story or an idea; the standard approach now is to discredit and distract, using 140-character tweets and selective quoting to undermine the writer and change the subject.
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