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Well. That’s not very nice. Michael Isikoff’s story about Rudy Giuliani’s connection to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in this week’s Newsweek, “The Qatari Connection,” treads much of the same ground as Wayne Barrett’s shamefully ignored Village Voice cover story on the same subject last week, “Rudy’s Ties to a Terror Sheikh.” To be sure, the Newsweek version of events doesn’t have quite the same sense of cloak-and dagger intrigue as the Voice’s, and relies less on unnamed sources. But Isikoff does collect similar quotes from some of the same sources as Barrett, like former CIA agent Bob Baer, who told him that Giuliani Partners “is metaphorically taking money from the same accounts that paid” the 9/11 mastermind. And the story he’s telling is essentially the same. And yet: There’s no mention of fact that the Village Voice broke the story at all. We know that it happens that reporters will be working on the same story at the same time, and frankly the sort of self-referential, Hey That Was Our Story First! media stories like the one the Voice has up today give us secondhand embarrassment. But the Newsweek story doesn’t look like something that was in the works for a long time, and now, when or if this story gets picked up it’s probably going to get attributed to Newsweek, and the Voice will be again relegated to the sidelines, reading its anarchy books and listening to its punk music and picking at its pimples and fantasizing about blowing up the school. And we can’t help it: We sympathize with the alt-weekly’s sad lament — dudes should have given the credit where it was due.
