Since (full disclosure) I love to hate The Times, post-Easter generosity prompts my giving credit where credit is due.

First their report today on the pressure brought on China to take some action regarding the genocide in Dafur. The newspaper of record even acknowledges the role played by Mia Farrow, citing her op-ed piece in (gasp) The Wall Street Journal — a piece I previously posted on dotCommonweal.

Here, in part is The Times’ story:

Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the
2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups
appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the
Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings
in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned
about.

Ms. Farrow, a good-will ambassador for the United
Nations Children’s Fund, has played a crucial role, starting a campaign
last month to label the Games in Beijing the “Genocide Olympics” and
calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an
artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do
something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street
Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could “go down in history as
the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,” a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films.

Four days later, Mr. Spielberg sent a letter to President Hu Jintao
of China, condemning the killings in Darfur and asking the Chinese
government to use its influence in the region “to bring an end to the
human suffering there,” according to Mr. Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin
Levy.

China soon dispatched Mr. Zhai to Darfur, a turnaround
that served as a classic study of how a pressure campaign, aimed to
strike Beijing in a vulnerable spot at a vulnerable time, could
accomplish what years of diplomacy could not.

Then how about this sample of “Letters to the Editor:”

To the Editor:

So, presumed guilty by fashionable black-white,
rich-poor, athlete-nonathlete stereotypes, Duke’s lacrosse players turn
out to be innocent victims.

I saw and despised Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy. But McCarthyism never gained a tenth the oppressive mind
control of today’s academic and media political correctness.

Charles Fred
Maspeth, Queens, April 12, 2007

•

To the Editor:

The
defense attorneys also pilloried the press for piling on early in the
Duke rape case investigation. The Times should examine its reporting in
this case and report to us, its loyal readers, as to how it contributed
or did not contribute to this miscarriage of justice.

Henry Belch
Fairfax, Va., April 12, 2007

Now let’s hear from the Public Editor.