But Kaus also notes that the details seem to argue for the opposite of the conclusion:
The Iraqi government may be on the verge of collapse, or not, but the NYT's piece doesn't come close to substantiating increased concerns about its stabiity. It's more like the opposite.
I'm not saying that the Times editors are predictable anti-war, anti-Bush types who reflexively leaped to a pessimistic extrapolation from the muddled Basra fighting and imposed that unsupported conclusion on their reporters. But they definitely succeeded in producing the piece that predictable anti-war types would have generated given no more information than the news that Maliki had failed to take all of Basra.
When you know the conclusion, the stories write themselves!
Well, sort of. To answer the question, there were nine NYT reporters involved in the production of the piece in question.
God, they really suck.
