Reply #12: What does the blueness of New York matter?

[I_like_chicken]

I don't think most New Yorkers, or Americans, consider themselves to be liberal or conservative, rather they consider themselves independent whether or not they are registered Dem or Rep. People think that its important to do whats best for the country based on the facts of the situation, and not on ideology. In order for Bush to be able to go to war, he had to convince the general public of the "facts" that Saddam was a threat and had WMD. Ideology would not be enough to convince people to go to war.

The idea that the NYTimes used Judith Miller in order to show they were not biased to save and increase the number of readers seems laughable. People do not care about the ideology of a paper, rather they care about how well it reports the facts. An attack on the ideology of the paper is in fact an attack on the ablitity of the paper to report the facts. If the paper cared about the perception that they were unable to report the facts because of their supposed ideology, they could have countered by opening up its newsroom to the public to show that their fact gathering techniques were sound. Instead they used a far right reporter to change their "facts" to fit those of the rest of the mainstream media. I do not believe for a second that the NYTimes believed what Judy Miller was reporting was true. The only explantion for the use of Judy Miller is that the NYTimes were co-conspirtors to decieve the public of the "facts" in order to persuade public opinion in favor of the war.