I’m still piecing it all together to be honest, but here’s how it goes so far:

on Monday two long-time Mideast analysts blast the White House, accusing them of censoring parts of their text, an article they were writing for the OpEd section of the NYTimes;

on Tuesday the NYTimes reports on this incident officially;

the authors, a married couple since 2003, are long-time analysts of the Middle East under multiple presidents, including Republican and Democrat; one of the authors, Flynt L. Leverett, previously worked for the CIA and the NSC;

Today, the NYTimes published two opinion articles by these authors, including the one with the blacked out text.

Now, what’s interesting here is how the blacked out text is compiled: rather than simply being a string of data, that is the amount of letters within the original text blacked out as a block of removed text, you can actually see the text broken down, with each letter replaced by a lowercase ‘x’:

blacked out text

Now I’m not saying that ‘xxx’ = ‘The’ or that ‘xxxxxxxxx’ = ‘terrorist’ but it is interesting that you can see the breakdown of the text by highlighting it by clicking+scrolling with your mouse. Of course there’s no guarantee that these xxxx’s are even real words, but that the possibility is there is intriguing nonetheless.

[via Daily Dreamtime]

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