Re-lynching Cynthia McKinney

How the New York Times and NPR still play games to get misleading quotes.

"Ms. McKinney suggest[ed] that President Bush might have known about the September 11 attacks but did nothing so his supporters could make money in a war."

When I called the Times reporter to ask for the source of this politically suicidal statement of McKinney's, she could not find it. When I pressed, she faked it, pathetically flailing about with false attempts to cover the sloppy reportage, citing for example the congressional record (where it did not appear).

NPR's hatchet job was much slicker. NPR said,

"[McKinney] suggested the Bush Administration may have known in advance about the September 11 attacks and allowed them to happen in order for people close to the President to profit"

Wow! And to back it up, NPR played her own words. She said,

“What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? . . . What do they have to hide?"

And NPR added her statement,

"And so we get this Presidency requesting a nearly unprecedented amount of money to go into a defense budget for defense spending that will directly benefit his father."

Sounds damning, until we listen closer. First, the interview was not with NPR, but clipped from rival Free Speech Radio Network. Unfortunately for NPR, Free Speech posted the entire McKinney interview. The full transcript indicated that NPR's pronouncement -- was simply off the wall, gluing together two statements far apart in the interview, both out of context. John Sugg, the respected editor of Atlanta's weekly paper (and no big fan of McKinney) called NPR's free-form editing one of the most egregious cases of journalistic malfeasance he'd seen in years.