in other news

Giuliani’s Terror Shame, Our Blog Shame

Giuliani

Photo: Getty Images

So we’ve been feeling guilty all week because we missed picking up on Wayne Barrett’s super-duper Village Voice report about Rudy Giuliani’s ties to Qatar, which in turn tie him to terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was a big story that we even read but then got caught up in other things and didn’t end up covering it. And then today, Joe Conason at Salon.com totally called us out on it.

Occasionally, as in the case of Rudolph Giuliani during this past week, the sudden appearance of not one but two juicy investigations overwhelms the system’s capacity to absorb and regurgitate. But when the nation’s news executives decided which of two highly embarrassing Giuliani stories to feature, nearly all of them made the wrong choice. While they lavished enormous attention upon a Politico story dealing with adultery and bureaucracy, they should be devoting at least as much time to yet another in the long series of Wayne Barrett scoops in the Village Voice, because this one involves business and terrorism.


Conason is right. Barrett is a little obsessed and maybe does push pins into dolls of Giuliani every night, but his reporting is accurate, smart, and in this case, important. Conason even comes up with ten questions that reporters can ask Giuliani about his Qatar connections so they don’t have to read the whole Voice story. So readers, go read the article. And Conason, thanks for giving us a bloggily self-referential way to assuage our own guilt.

Giuliani’s Terrorist Ties [Salon]
Rudy’s Ties to a Terror Sheikh [VV]

Giuliani’s Terror Shame, Our Blog Shame