NPR Bias Alert - NPR

NPR Bias Alert - NPR News covered the killing of a US solder in an ambush in Iraq today. As part of the coverage, the reporter said (I'm closely paraphrasing here): "The ambushed happened in an area of Iraq populated by conservative Sunni Moslems sympathetic to Hussein's regime..."

"Conservative?" Haven't we been down this road before?

Hussein was no Conservative either politically (he was a pure Stalinist) or theologically (his regime had nothing to do with conservative Islam, Sunni or otherwise).

Let's step back through history to put this bit in some context:

• NPR called the Communist Party remnants in Eastern Europe "conservatives" when they advocated rolling back free-market advances in the nineties.
• The Tienanmen Square massacre was ordered by - yep, "conservative" Chinese hardliners.
• The Iranian Mullahs - the ones that utterly radicalized Iranian society? Yep. "Conservative". I'm trying to find the definition of "conservative" that involves "radical uprooting of all the institutions of society".

Mark my words - if Castro keeps killing and imprisoning journalists and dissidents, the current revulsion that some of the more honest leftists currently feel for El Jefe will culminate, someday, in an NPR reporter referring to Castro as "conservative".

And when that happens, Castro will be in real trouble; his lefty patrons in the US will officially dump him.

Posted by Mitch at June 7, 2003 06:14 PM