It was 1940 and the Germans had the drop on the British. The Nazis had just pushed the British literally into the sea at Dunkirk and despite a heroic evacuation of nearly 350,000 men, almost all of the British Expeditionary Force’s armor and artillery had to be left behind.

England was hurt badly but not defenseless. Her navy still commanded the Channel and the North Sea thus blocking any realistic effort by Germany to invade the Island. And of course, the Royal Air Force was poised to do battle with the Luftwaffe whenever Hitler decided the time was ripe to strike.

But the Nazi dictator was hesitating. After conquering most of Europe, his armies stood a scant 22 miles across the Channel from the White Cliffs of Dover. But Hitler and the German General Staff had barely even thought of how to go about invading and occupying the British Isles. Operation Sea Lion, the German war plan for the attack on Great Britain was just that – a plan. And not a very good one at that.

So Hitler decided on trying a gambit that had worked like a charm on other occasions; a major speech in which he would offer England “peace” in return for a free hand on the continent. Hitler, so in love with the sound of his own voice and so confident in his ability to sway people failed to realize that times had changed.

In describing the scene at the Reichstag where Hitler delivered his “Peace Speech,” noted Nazi chronicler William L. Shirer commented that he thought that the address was one of Hitler’s finest – and certainly his most brazenly dishonest. He didn’t want war with the English. The Germans and English were historic friends. It was that demon Churchill and the Jews that started the war. He outlined a future where Germany and Great Britain would be partners in peace, united in racial brotherhood and comity.

The response from the British was lightening fast. Within a half an hour after the conclusion of Hitler’s speech, the BBC was on the air rejecting all of the dictator’s proposals out of hand. Britain would never make peace with Germany as long as Europe was enslaved by Hitler. The BBC’s towering denunciation of the speech sounded like an official response from Churchill’s government. But it wasn’t. On its own, the BBC had taken to the air and given the only response a free people could give. As Churchill said later, no one from government had contacted the BBC nor encouraged it in any way. The response was entirely the idea of the BBC staff.

In this instance, the BBC crossed the invisible line between reporting the news and making the news. No doubt they felt they had good reason to do so. They weren’t taken in for one second by Hitler’s propaganda. This despite the fact that all during the 1930’s when Hitler was building his war machine and carrying out his bloodless conquests, the BBC (along with most other major newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune) took whatever Hitler had to say at face value and swallowed his disinformation whole. This despite warnings from disgusted correspondents in Berlin like Norman Ebbut of the London Times whose editor Geoffrey Dawson famously wrote to a correspondent that he did his “utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their (German) sensibilities.” This meant that most of Ebbut’s brilliant reporting on the depravity of the Nazi regime went unread.

Contrast the experience of the BBC with today’s reporting from Iraq. Both the BBC then and the media today know that there are agents of disinformation seeking to spin the news by giving slanted even erroneous reports. The question we should be asking the media – like the question directed by Churchill at the BBC and the London Times prior to the World War II - is how hard are you trying to get the story right?

Once it became clear that Hitler was a threat to the existence of the nation, the BBC and other British news outlets started to view what the Nazis were saying with a much more critical eye. But couldn’t they have figured this out sooner? Why did they swallow enemy propaganda so willingly?

We asked similar questions during the Israeli-Hizbullah war when it became readily apparent that the AP (and thus hundreds of media outlets around the world) were using photos and stories from outright Hizbullah sympathizers whose job could only have been to give enemy propaganda to western reporters. And in Iraq, many critics have pointed to the almost total reliance by the mainstream press on Iraqi “stringers” for news of what’s happening around the country.

First of all, I am constrained to point out that reporting from Iraq is a nightmare. Going outside of the “green zone” is an invitation to being kidnapped or killed if you’re a western reporter. It is not a question of courage. It’s a question of common sense. Reporters are not combatants and are not armed. The use of stringers in order to assist in the news gathering process is an absolute necessity. Without them, reporters would be limited to writing from CENTCOM news releases and Iraqi government press handouts. And while some may consider that sufficient, I don’t think very many of us truly want the press that much in the pocket of the government.

Having said all of this, I have a few pointed questions that I’d like to ask the New York Times, the Washington Post, the news nets and others who use stringers in gathering the news.

Who are they? What are their backgrounds? Are they journalists? If so, what kind of experience have they had? Have then been vetted to make sure they aren’t out and out insurgent sympathizers? Or militia mouthpieces?

Do they have axes to grind against America? How does the reporter in Iraq or the editor back home establish their objectivity or accuracy? Does the reporter on site even try and confirm information from the stringers? If so, how many sources are used to confirm their stories? How do you gauge the reliability of those confirming sources?

This is the nuts and bolts of journalism. Raw information is not news. It has to be poked and prodded, examined and re-examined in a process that is supposed to reduce that information to its most basic and understandable parts and then massaged by the reporter and polished by the editor to appear as “news” in the newspaper or on the TV broadcast.

Reporters here at home have established rules regarding sources and story confirmations that are carefully followed (for the most part) and a level of trust that what we are reading is reasonably accurate has been established. Bloggers are very good at pointing out where this system fails and, depending on the news outlet, the failure is either swept under the rug or actually addressed. The news business is far from infallible and everything from out right bias to downright laziness can infect the news.

But there seem to be different rules for war reporting from the Middle East. It appears to this observer that there is too much trust between the parties involved in news gathering and not enough hard, slogging, verification of information that is reported on a day to day basis. I have no doubt that reporters trust the information they get from their stringers (and other sources as well). And the editors here at home feel they have to trust and support their reporters in the war zone who, after all, are still taking a tremendous personal risk despite them being largely confined to living and working in the green zone.

But it doesn’t appear to be good enough. Curt at Flopping Aces, a longtime supporter and linker to this site, has done an extraordinary job of ferreting out a piece of disinformation passed along by a source who evidently is not who he says he is and has also proven to be unreliable in the past. Read the entire post as Curt digs deeper and deeper into how this one Iraqi “police captain” (who CENTCOM reports is not on any police roster) passed along a bogus story about Sunni civilians set on fire this past weekend that created a huge sensation internationally but is almost certainly no true.

While it is unclear whether the AP reporter who “broke” this story interviewed the fake policeman personally or whether he received the information from someone else, the fact that editors around the world (it was front page news in my local suburban daily) ran the story without question is enormously troubling. All Curt possessed to discover this information about the fake police captain was a computer and a modem. He didn’t need any special expertise to ferret out this information. Are you trying to tell me the editors of mutli-million dollar enterprises don’t have the time or the energy to do exactly what Curt did regarding this story?

I totally reject that notion. This is pure laziness on the part of the media. There is no excuse, no other explanation possible. They didn’t bother because either their pre-conceived notions of the violence in Iraq came into play or they felt it wasn’t necessary because the AP had supposedly vetted the story. If the former, that kind of bias has no place in a newsroom. And if it was the latter, it shows that the editors of those newspapers care little about what appears on the pages of their publications.

And what do we make of Patterico’s brilliant work regarding the stringer’s story told to the Los Angeles Times Iraq reporter about an American “bombing” in Ramadi; a bombing that never occurred. The stringer’s report of civilian deaths is also apparently a hoax (or disinformation). The fact that all we are getting is silence from the LA Times is par for the course but it does make one curious about the answers to all those questions I asked above. Read Patterico’s analysis and then start contemplating what else we might be hearing and reading about that has no basis in fact.

This is not to minimize what is happening in Iraq. And I don’t agree with those who believe that the efforts of Curt and Patterico reveal that things aren’t really that bad in that bloody land. Independent sources far and wide – including our own military and military sympathizers – paint a portrait of a country spinning out of control and headed for tragedy. But it is clear from these two deliberately planted stories that the insurgents in Iraq wish to keep the pressure on the White House and the American people in order that they not change their minds about withdrawal.

Beyond that, the questions these stories raise for the media are very troubling. It is not a matter of accusing them of bias. It is a basic question of trust between the reader and journalist without which the news becomes meaningless drivel. And if the media are not going to reveal answers to some of those questions I asked above, I would sincerely hope that they start asking them internally.

One way that a different perspective on the news from Iraq could gain currency is if the American media bothered to embed themselves with our armed forces. At last report, there were only 9 authorized embeds by the American media. This is shameful. We have 130,000 men and women in harms way and the American media can’t find eager reporters willing to face the danger in order to tell their stories? As we wind down our involvement in this tragedy, let’s hope that more reporters are willing to see what it is our forces are doing so that the American people have a complete picture of the conflict.

Reporters and editors are human. But somehow, I can’t escape the feeling that they are not carrying out their responsibilities to tell the story of this war to the best of their abilities. They are letting us down. And for that, they should be ashamed of themselves.