The New York Times, apparently. While there are real stories that need investigating -- i.e., how it could possibly be that a museum employee could just happen to be in a Cairo train station and notice a bag that turns out to contain pieces stolen from the museum, or why it is that the museum was not more fully locked down in the days before it was looted, or why the guards on Egypt's sites and at their storerooms were either not armed or inadequately armed to prevent gangs of looters from overrunning them -- the Times lazily trolls blogs for a tempest in a teapot regarding Hawass' deal with a clothing line manufacturer. The lede of the story exhibits a very distressing blindness about what really matters:
Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s longtime chief antiquities official, has been criticized in recent months for many things: his closeness to former President Hosni Mubarak, some inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising and for his role in a dispute over an Egyptian museum bookstore, for which he now possibly faces jail time.
At the very least, "inconsistent reports on the safety of archaeological sites during the uprising" should read "his failure to secure the Egypt Museum and archaeological sites during and after the uprising". But one would have hoped that someone at the Times had a better sense of stories worth spending journalistic energy on.
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