Whose Side Is the "Los Angeles Times" On?

Unable to resist the opportunity to malign the American military and to put the lives of more American soldiers at risk, the Los Angeles Times yesterday published two-year-old photos of American troops posing with the body parts of Taliban suicide bombers.

Attempting to stake out a position on the moral high ground, LA Times editor Davan Maharaj rationalized his decision:

At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions. We have a particular duty to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan. On balance, in this case, we felt that the public interest here was served by publishing a limited, but representative sample of these photos, along with a story explaining the circumstances under which they were taken.

One can only wonder whether the paper’s love of impartiality includes publishing photos of the horrors produced by the Taliban.

If you publish information that will serve the propaganda purposes of the Taliban, you have no right to cower behind a claim of moral superiority and journalistic integrity.

War is not impartial. Serving the interests of one warring party disserves the interests of the other.

One understands that many segments of the press are happy to embarrass the military because they feel that the military is the enemy to their liberal values. They also believe that their true enemy, the Republican Party, more closely associated with the military and its values.

For them the true war is against conservatism and Fox News, not against the Taliban and Islamic terrorism.

This makes it all the more ironic that the Times should have published photos of actions that took place during the Obama administration. One feels their moral anguish, but one assumes that they believed that the administration would be able to escape opprobrium by blaming the troops.

In any case, the real question is yesterday’s decision was: Whose side is the Los Angeles Times on?

To have a fuller appreciation of the moral fraud perpetrated by the Times we need but consider its failure to publish information that might have helped readers to make an informed decision about presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

When it came to protecting Obama, vigorous impartiality took second place to the paper’s wish to promote his election.

Of course, I am referring to a videotape of a going-away party that took place in Chicago in 2003. The party was convened to celebrate the achievements of PLO spokesman and Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi, a man who was about to leave Chicago to take a professorship at Columbia University.

For the full story, read Andrew McCarthy’s account.

Among those in attendance were Khalidi’s close friend and frequent dinner companion, Barack Obama. Also present were notable Israel-bashers and terrorists, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

One can only imagine the anti-Israeli vitriol that filled the room. One can only imagine the kind words Barack Obama offered to his close personal friend in support of the Palestinian cause.

One needs to imagine these things because the Times has refused, to this day, to release the videotape.

Clearly, the Times has long since taken leave of its journalistic integrity.

It’s about time that its readers expressed their disapproval by taking their leave of its pages.