Well, the drafting committee in Iraq finally finished their business and sent a draft on to the full assembly. Sunni members of the committee were not happy and many of them boycotted the ceremony.

The WaPo's account is unrelievedly pessimistic:

And so the battle lines were drawn for the fall referendum: The Shiites and Kurds, who dominated the drafting process, implored the public to vote in favor of it. Minority Sunnis condemned the document for, among other things, allowing the creation of federal regions that they fear could split Iraq and warned that it could inflame the insurgency. The Sunnis vowed to muster enough support to vote it down.

By Jonathan Finer and Omar Fekeiki

Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 29, 2005; Page A01

Read it here.

The NYT was similarly downbeat:

And so the battle lines were drawn for the fall referendum: The Shiites and Kurds, who dominated the drafting process, implored the public to vote in favor of it. Minority Sunnis condemned the document for, among other things, allowing the creation of federal regions that they fear could split Iraq and warned that it could inflame the insurgency. The Sunnis vowed to muster enough support to vote it down.

Read it here.

By DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: August 29, 2005

Notice anything here?

Four authors, two different major papers, identical words.

Wonder how that happened? ESP? One set of writers copied from the other? Both copied from a common source? What happened here? At the least it's lazy, sloppy journalism. At the worst it is blatant plagarism.

Whatever, somebody's busted.

UPDATE:

Mickey Kaus informs me that the offending paragraph no longer appears in the NYT story. That's the wonder of the internet; we can rewrite the historical record on the fly. The new-new journalism may be a lot sloppier, and perhaps more mendacious, than it was half a century ago, but it is also a self-correcting mechanism in which our perception of what happened is in a constant state of flux. Remember how shocked Orwell's Winston Smith was to realize that the historical record was malleable? Now it's just the way things are.

Through constant self-correction are we moving toward objective accuracy, or are we just reinforcing a conventional wisdom? I'll leave that to Thomas Kuhn to figure out.

NYT photo