On July 8, 2007, Clark Hoyt the Public Editor (and the “readers’ representative”) of the New York Times, criticized the paper for allegedly having “slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about al Qaeda’s role in Iraq.”
Hoyt called “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” an “Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion” and suggested that Times reporters should be asking “tough questions” whenever the President claimed there was a link with Al Qaeda.
On July 17, 2007, the Director of National Intelligence presented to the President and the Congress a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). One of the "key judgments" of the NIE was that “Al–Qaeda will leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack us here [in the United States].”
On July 24, 2007, the President gave a major address at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, discussing in considerable detail the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about the links between AIQ and the central leadership of Al Qaeda.
How did the Times cover the speech, given the Clark Hoyt admonition about quoting the President, and the Times’ own guidelines that preclude its reporters from even using the name “Al Qaeda in Iraq” and require instead the strange locution of “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” (in the words of letter writer J.M Hanes, to “avoid the sin of putting Al Qaeda and Iraq in the same sentence”)?
If you want to see the results of Clark Hoyt journalism, please read: “The Times Reports and Distorts a Presidential Address.”