Reply #24: Yes, Josh, I do like it

[pinboy3niner]

This is the NYT's Burns again, the same correspondent who reported details challenging the Gaddafi regime's claims about another airstrike in Tripoli:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1099091&mesg_id=1099298

What I like about Burns' reports is that he doesn't seem to think it's adequate for the media to merely report regime claims/NATO claims and call that 'fair and balanced.' He seeks out more information to add persective on the contradictory claims. Here, his reporting again challenges the truthfulness of the regime:

But the funeral itself seemed strangely flat, at least in political terms. For one thing, despite the location being broadcast on Libyan state television, and circulated in cellphone text messages, barely 500 people showed up, in a city of two million. No important government officials attended. For all the browbeating directed at foreign reporters by mourners who vowed their love for Colonel Qaddafi and their hatred for NATO, the event, taken as a whole, seemed underwhelming.

Part of the problem lay in the contradictions and uncertainties that flowed from official accounts, and those given by the mourners.

According to officials, the nine coffins, with bodies wrapped in the green of Islam, were those of the dead Muslim clerics. But some mourners offered differing counts. Two men whispered that their uncles, among those being buried, were soldiers, and one of those said the man concerned had been dead for weeks. Another identified one of the dead as a driver.

I wonder when Burns will be deported?