A tale of two gaffes

If you are a regular reader of the New York Times, you know that John McCain mistakenly said that Iran has been supporting Al Qaeda. You know this because the NYT reported it several times. Here, in no particular order, are some NYT articles which report McCain's error.

one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight

One might formulate the hypothesis that the NYT believes that gaffes by Presidential candidates are newsworthy. If, for example, John McCain were to say that the USA can't invade Iran because we don't have enough Arabic translators, one imagines the NYT would be quick to point out that Iran's principal language, Persian (also known as Farsi), is unrelated to Arabic.

Recently, Barack Obama gave us a test of this hypothesis. Speaking at a town hall meeting in Cape Girardeau, MO, on May 13, 2008, Obama started to make the point that by having troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US was overstretching its capacity for Arabic translators. Obama was forgetting that Arabic is not a major language in Afghanistan. The major languages there are Dari (a dialect of Persian) and Pashtun, followed by Uzbek, Turkmen, and several other minor languages.

Now Obama got around to correcting himself. So his confusion was only momentary. If you are interested in seeing exactly what happened, here is a link to the video.

Still, a gaffe is a gaffe, and it ought to be newsworthy. Like McCain's gaffe, Obama's showed confusion about local politics and culture. And how did the New York Times treat it?

They didn't. If you go to the NYT's search page, and search for Obama Afghanistan Arabic, you do get two hits, but they are both from before May 13, when Obama made his mistake.

And by the way, returning to the NYT's coverage of McCain's Al Qaeda gaffe, eight mentions were apparently not enough. Here are some more:

nine
ten
eleven

And that's not all. In link number six above, the NYT claimed that McCain repeated his gaffe at an April meeting of the Foreign Armed Services Committee. The only problem with that one is that, as Power Line reported here, he didn't.

It seems that, when it comes to gaffes by Presidential candidates, the NYT's treatment is far from even handed.