Conor notes this statement by Mark Steyn:
The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have been castrated by political correctness.
Thus is reproduced as fact at the Corner, the way Newsweek uses a campaign book like Going Rogue as self-evidently part of the historical record. But, to read only the NYT for the past decade reveals Steyn to be hallucinating:
Over a period of roughly a decade, the newspaper ran everything from major internationally reported stories on honor killings in its glossy magazine to a crime story about a local honor killing on its New York regional page. It covered honor killings in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
The topic garnered attention from magazine editors, freelancers, staff reporters in the newspaper, writers on the book review and arts pages, and multiple op-ed columnists from across the ideological spectrum. One of those columnists wrote multiple items about honor killings across several years (and even mentioned them in a couple columns that won a Pulitzer Prize!). Considering the magazine stories on honor killings alone, the Times must have spent tens of thousands of dollars at minimum covering the subject in its Sunday glossy. Honor killings were also deemed important enough to frequently appear in the World Section briefs.
So what on earth is Mark Steyn talking about?
Himself, I think. But since there is only a tenuous connection between what Steyn writes and what most people deem as non-wingnut reality, this critique will hold no water on the right. What matters to them is not grappling with what is, but asserting an ideology and cultural solidarity against libruls. So we have a simple test: will NRO correct the record (as if Steyn has ever conceded an error on anything), or will epistemic closure reign on?