Well, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I was writing a long and intelligent post contrasting varying types and degrees of bias and spin in news, when a different browser window froze and I closed it - and doing so closed all my browser windows. Let this be a lesson: don't dawdle.

I'm not going to bother recreating all that I had written. I'll leave the subtle philosophical commentary out of it and just skip to the political commentary. Here's a story I found earlier today on the Le Monde website, the leading French newspaper: La recherche de l'arsenal de Saddam Hussein tourne au fiasco. The link to that on the Le Monde website is even more explicitly anti-Bush. It says "L'Irak n'avait pas d'armes de destruction massive."

For those who don't speak French (or who want a less biased version), here's the Reuters interview with David Kay, the guy who until yesterday was in charge of the search for WMDs. Text of interview with David Kay. The most interesting part is when he says, "I don't think they [stockpiles of WMDs] existed." But see how CNN treated that issue: by practially ignoring it. This is the only story they have about the fact that the leader of the Americans searching for WMDs said that there weren't any. You might think that I posted the wrong link, but no, look again; five paragraphs from the bottom, they finally get around to Kay's opinions.

All talk about the fairy tale WMDs under the bed aside, (and of course that's a spin too), I just thought the competing biases were very interesting. because there's the Le Monde piece, and then there's CNN's piece. I guess maybe I could have found an even bigger example of bias if I had gone to Fox News instead of CNN, but I think this is big enough, especially considering that you don't get much more mainstream than CNN.