Topic: NewsBusters
A Feb. 19 NewsBusters post (and TimesWatch item) by Clay Waters falsely suggests that a New York Times article on the Ugandan premiere of the film "The Last King of Scotland," about former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, didn't mention Amin's dictatorial ways and discussed only "Amin’s complexities" and "Amin’s positive qualities."
In fact, the second paragraph specifically mentions "the blood-soaked reign of Uganda’s mercurial dictator, Idi Amin." A later paragraph reads:
Amin, a charismatic army sergeant and fearsome boxer, seized power in 1971, promising to shake off the vestiges of colonialism. Instead, he plunged his country into a bloodbath, brutally eliminating his enemies — sometimes quite personally, with a hammer — until he was overthrown in 1979. More than 300,000 people are believed to have been killed.
Waters makes no mention of this, even though his statement that Amin "is thought to have killed over 300,000 of his countrymen" is essentially lifted from the above paragraph.
