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I thought you might be interested in the article from the FAIR web site. The following article will be appended to your message: KAL 007 and Iran Air 655 By Norman Solomon The day after a Soviet interceptor plane blew up a Korean passenger jet, the first sentence of a New York Times editorial (9/2/83) was unequivocal: "There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner." Headlined "Murder in the Air", the editorial asserted that "no circumstance whatever justifies attacking an innocent plane." Confronted with the sudden reality of a similar action by the U.S. government, the New York Times inverted every standard invoked with righteous indignation five years earlier. Editorials condemning the KAL shoot down were filled with phrases like "wanton killing," "reckless aerial murder" and "no conceivable excuse." But when Iran Air's flight 655 was blown out of the sky on July 3, excuses were more than conceivable – they were profuse. Two days after the Iranian passenger jet went down in flames killing 290 people, the Times (7/5/88) editorialized that "while horrifying, it was nonetheless an accident." The editorial concluded, "The onus for avoiding such accidents in the future rests on civilian aircraft: avoid combat zones, fly high, acknowledge warnings." A similar pattern pervaded electronic media coverage. In the aftermath of the KAL incident, America's airwaves routinely carried journalistic denunciations. CBS anchor Dan Rather, for example, called it a "barbaric act." No such adjectives were heard from America's TV commentators when discussing the U.S. shoot down of a civilian jet. To read the rest of the article, please click on the link below. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1527 This article was published on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting's Website (http://www.fair.org).

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