I have to confess to being a a little underwhelmed by the AP story of burning mosques and burning Sunnis. Not that I don’t believe the story is important or that the work done by several bloggers hasn’t been outstanding.
It’s just that we’ve been down this road before many times. Conservatives have been questioning the facts about news stories coming out of Iraq for more than 3 years. We questioned stories from the Israeli-Hizbullah war last summer. We have known about the disinformation, the enemy plants, the outrageous bias of the international wire services AP, AFP, Reuters, as well as the BBC.
We have seen photos doctored, stories embellished or faked outright. Anyone remember the “chemical weapon attack” on Fallujah? We have seen civilian body counts inflated and stories of how they died swallowed whole by a press who would rather believe enemy propaganda than their own military; a press who suspends belief when given information that reflects poorly on the American military but insists on triple confirmations before they publish a retraction – if they ever bother.
And they don’t bother. The burning Sunnis were last week’s news, already forgotten in the rush of events. Bush and Maliki. The Iraq Study Group. Obama, Obama, Obama.
In their smug, self righteous little cocoons, the AP and others continue the process of making sausages out of the news. The burning Sunnis were just one mind-numbing atrocity in a Flanders Field of atrocities so who really, really cares down deep if we blew it? Just put up the old firewall of denial, do a cursory follow up by finding some “eyewitnesses” (who probably read about the burning Sunnis in the paper or saw the report on TV), neglect to mention our little police captain problem and that’ll do it. End of story.
AP can do this because ultimately, we are not their clients. Unlike newspapers or TV networks, the AP could give a hoot about the people who actually end up reading their enemy propaganda. The people who pay them are, of course, the newspapers and TV stations that subscribe to their service.
And what does that say then about all of those media outlets who carried this story? Curt at Flopping Aces was able to raise numerous questions about the truth of the burning Sunnis story after a couple of hours of research using nothing more than some common sense, a curious mind, and a modem. If similar questions had been raised in newsrooms across America, I can guarantee you any responsible editor would have put a “hold” on that story. At least until a later revision from AP had been forthcoming.
But that wouldn’t have been good enough. The changing nature of journalism in America means that to a large extent, reporters are almost as incurious about the world as their readers. What would it have cost to pick up the phone and call CENTCOM? The PA officers there got back to Curt within a few hours with the info that contradicted the AP story. Better yet, duplicating Curt’s work, how much trouble would it have been to Google up Capt. Jamil Hussein? Would the fact that he appeared as a source for AP so many times over the previous months raised a red flag in any newsroom in America? I doubt it.
I think the difference between journalists today and those of 20 or 30 years ago is that reporters used to have a thirst for knowledge, an “itch” that could never be scratched. They attacked a story, constantly challenging assumptions, digging ever deeper to see if there was anything else there. They did it not necessarily because they were afraid they were wrong but rather because they were afraid they were missing the true essence of the story.
But the shocking incuriousness of the media who left the vetting of this story to AP and allowed it to appear in newspapers across the country proves that times indeed have changed. Publishers and editors used to stand by everything that appeared in their publication. But how can they do that today if they don’t make even the most cursory of efforts to see that what is printed actually happened.
And lest there be any doubts about whether this incident actually happened or not, here’s Sharon Tosi Moore, an officer in the United States Army Reserves currently serving in Iraq with a piece in The American Thinker today:
A winning situation all around.Except, well, except for the tiny little detail that the incident most likely never happened. A week has gone by and no charred bodies were produced. No dramatic funeral parades, with all the attendant wailing and gnashing of teeth, occurred. Not one photo. No grand reprisals. Not even any speeches (and it is hard to imagine Iraqi religious leaders miss an opportunity to make speeches). Just a few remarks from the Iraqi government, largely ignored by the U.S. press, that all reports showed that that particular district had been quiet, and pleading the Iraqi people for calm.
No one thought to question this unusual divergence from normal protocol.
The gullible press swallowed the initial claims whole. Of the major news sources, only TIME Magazine used the word “reportedly” in their headline.
Gullibility is not really the issue. I believe the issue is laziness. And perhaps a lack of passion that enables the reporter to simply go through the motions of being a journalist instead of living up to what his editors and readers expect.
This story is revealing of many things, not the least of which is that our free press is in trouble. Partly from infringements by government but also by lousy stewardship of this precious right being carried out by many the current practitioners of the craft. Not all, of course. There are still some excellent journalists writing for the top publications. But by and large, those whose responsibility it is to inform us, to keep us abreast of what’s going on in the world, are failing and failing badly.
And the hell of it is, no one seems to want to fix the problems much less address them.
5:43 pm
Rick, I’m sorry, but did you notice these simple facts:
1) This crusade against “false information in Iraq” is being lead by Ministry of Interior, which essentially says that nothing is true until it confirmed that it’s true.
2) The former Minister of Interior (now Minister of Finance) had been caught running death squads and secret prisons. At the regular Iraq blog you can read about women being harassed by MOI members for not wearing veils and other “non-Muslim” behavior.
3) The current Minister of Interior is a former Sadrist.
4) Al-Maliki had recently said that “Al-Sadr is not a problem”.
Do you really have such strong a belief in the lack of corruption in the Iraqi government (which consists mostly of Islamic extremists), that it’s OK with you if the representative of it’s most notorious branch says “nothing is news unless we say it’s news”?
Forget about AP, just think about this: Al-Maliki says that Al-Sadr is not a problem; there are wide “rumors” about ethnic cleansing in Baghdad (you know, just as there were “highly improbable rumors” about Holocaust at WWII times); Al-Sadr’s ally says that all the news about violence should be checked with him; it’s a general agreement among most of the Iraqi bloggers that all the Al-Maliki’s talks about unity are shallow and he’s just an Iran’s puppet; Al-Maliki ran a cell of Jihadists Insurgents in 80-ies sponsored by Iran, and there are good grounds to suspect that he was in the game when his organization bombed American Embassy in Kuwait and when Hezbollah, which was just a branch of his organization, did all the bombings in Lebanon in.
And you are ready to forget about all those factors, all because it gives you pleasure when somebody bashes AP?
5:48 pm
Forget about AP? Right.
Look – I could care less about the MOI. And I’ve written more posts on this blog about the corrupt crazies at the IM than I care to recall at this moment.
This has nothing to do with “rumors.” It has to do with a story that is symptomatic of the way the news is covered EVERYWHERE. Not just in Iraq. And if you’re brain is too shallow to digest what I wrote, why bother to comment?
6:28 pm
>Look – I could care less about the MOI.
But MOI is the only source that says that the story is a lie. And it also says that it will actively suppress any news that it doesn’t confirm. And you’re giving MOI all the benefit of a doubt, while giving AP none.
Remember 150 Sunni academics kidnapped by people in MOI uniform? Remember how quick Al-Maliki was to declare that “this was not a terrorist act”?
And also consider these words of Bush about Maliki: “As opposed to saying, America, you go solve the problem, we have a Prime Minister who’s saying, stop holding me back, I want to solve the problem.”
You know, it’s not that paranoid to suspect that the situation is just this simple: the government, which is comprised of extremists with clear sectarian loyalties, wants to unleash a full-scale slaughter of Sunnis (“to solve the Sunni problem in Baghdad”), and doesn’t want anything of this reported.
Don’t you think that such a possibility is something much more important than AP-bashing? (which is so far about AP words vs. MOI words only; if somebody thinks that AP are notorious liars, it would be just liars vs. liars, since MOI is not known for the total honesty)
>if you’re brain is too shallow
Well, you guess if the personal insult comes from you, it’s OK. :))
6:30 pm
I just wrote a long post, which I lost. This one is much shorter. I don’t believe it is laziness or lack of passion, it’s bias, arrogance and group think. Look has they went after the Jessica Lynch story to debunk that and how they investigated the Haditha story. They can be pretty darn energetic when they are going after the military or America.
6:49 pm
I don’t believe it is laziness or lack of passion, it’s bias, arrogance and group think.
Please forgive me if I’m annoying, but can’t you guys please wake up!
Consider this quote from MOI’s press conferences supposedly debunking AP story: On this note, I would like to thank some of the brothers in the media who are cautious and take the extra step to make sure the news he gets is correct or not, by contacting the ministry to verify any news through us that they hear or receive.
Al-Maliki just suggested that Al-Sadr’s militias will be “included in the political process”. Can’t you see what all this means? There will be a massive genocide, and they will suppress and discredit all the reports, or, in other words, ask for the news to be verified with the perpetrators of this genocide.
7:46 pm
Blind Mice
There’s a simple way to solve the problem. AP has to produce the guy. Let Hussein provide his bona-fides. If he is who he says he is, then we can take the story from there. If AP refuses to take this action, or other media outlets cannot find the guy…
9:01 pm
Blind Mice—sadly the AP has no need to solve the problem. They simply announce that they’re satisfied, and there’s no further recourse.
If a major media source like the New York Times or ABC News put on a public demand for an investigation, perhaps they could force the AP to bring in some outside, trusted experts and find out what really happened. But, the media apparently have no interest in doing so,
9:02 pm
Yes, simply produce the good Captain and allow him to be questioned in the same manner as the representatives of the Iraq Government and US military are every day. What’s not to understand about that?
9:09 pm
Nikolay,
It could be the MOI is wrong or perfideous, but that is not the point. The point is that in the face of the photos doctored, stories embellished or faked outright, and opinions that seem to say that Abu Grave is somehow worse than beheadings, opinions that present as fact that our side is always wrong; what are we to do to find out what is true and how might the MSM regain the trust it is squandering and a plea for someone to care.
Is that too hard for you?
9:09 pm
Nikolay,
It could be the MOI is wrong or perfideous, but that is not the point. The point is that in the face of the photos doctored, stories embellished or faked outright, and opinions that seem to say that Abu Grave is somehow worse than beheadings, opinions that present as fact that our side is always wrong; what are we to do to find out what is true and how might the MSM regain the trust it is squandering and a plea for someone to care.
Is that too hard for you?
9:44 pm
“what are we to do to find out what is true and how might the MSM regain the trust it is squandering and a plea for someone to care.”
Well, I guess the best thing is to listen to the President who says that everything is almost fabulous and that Al-Maliki is the right guy for Iraq, despite the fact that he was a terrorist on Iran’s pay for some 20 years. You have also to listen to the opinion that you are on the verge of victory, that only the madman would believe that there could be a civil war in Iraq, that it would hardly take more than six weeks for all this thing to be over, that all the violence is caused by Al-Qaeda, that “we’ll succeed unless we quit”, that Iraq will be an ally in the war on terror despite the fact that its government consists of radical Islamists in love with Iran, that the speaker of Iraqi parliament blaming all the bad things in Iraq on Joooos and Zoinst pigs is just expressing his opinion, which a good sign of democracy, etc., etc. I won’t go with WMD stuff. :)))
Well, I believe, the guys who said all those things above won’t ever loose your trust (and they are not, like, in charge of anything), so you can just read their press-releases and leave the MSM-propaganda to the stupid.
And when Centcom denounces AP’s story based on the words of the guy that they, accidentally, have on their own list of unreliable sources, that leaves no doubt that AP is, indeed, a mouthpiece for terrorists.
Sorry for the rant.
9:50 pm
This is a real life example of the Aesop’s fable about the boy who cried wolf. The media has cried “wolf, wolf” so often when there was little or no threat, that we no longer believe them. Now, even if they are telling the truth about this and other incidents of sectarian violence, our past experience suggests otherwise. The only way to gain the credibility that is vital for a democracy is for the press to be extremely transparent and be extremely conscientious in verifying stories from Iraq.
10:20 pm
Getting The News From The Enemy, Update IV
HT Flopping Aces
Here’s more on this developing story from Curt at Flopping Aces. I’m starting a new thread because the other was getting a little long in the tooth :-).
AP issued a press release standing by it’s story. Iraq…
10:43 pm
Nikolay,
According to you there are people who want to downplay the problems in Iraq. Doesn’t it stand to reason that there are also people who might want to up-play the problems in Iraq.
As somebody who is so sensative to being told “lies,” shouldn’t you be at least a little curious to know if the AP is publishing lies?
11:11 pm
As somebody who is so sensative to being told “lies,†shouldn’t you be at least a little curious to know if the AP is publishing lies?
Well, if somebody proves this, I would say that they are wrong to do so. But a press-release from MOI confirming that it totally doesn’t have a particular guy in police doesn’t ring “they caught MSM enemy propaganda” bell for me, it rings “that’s b/s” bell. I just don’t believe that somebody could say such thing with absolute certainty in Baghdad. Unless they made sure that he doesn’t work there (or exists) anymore, of course.
I think, it’s really funny how blogosphere
goes into overdrive over any such event, with all the judgments passed before any facts are presented.
And there’s no way you can prove that misinformation presented by MSM (which Malkin &friends sees only as some vast conspiracy) could compare in scale with misinformation presented by the officials.
For me this just borders on demented, the way they are focused on supposed hidden terrorist agenda in anything liberal, while paying almost zero attention to the fact that, for example, Iraqi policy was, in effect, about turning a secular country into Islamist one, dividing Iraqis into Sunnis and Shias, putting terrorists into power and so on. That’s way more important, isn’t it?
Anyway, speaking about MSM, I prefer to read Iraqi blogs. They are usually several months ahead of MSM, which, even with the best intentions, tends to oversimplify matters.
12:11 am
[...] UPDATE 5: More (to be updated continually for a while) from Democracy Project; Right Wing Nut House; a soldier checking in with American Thinker (“A review of the databases that painstakingly record every single incident in Iraq shows no evidence or report of the event. It is hard to believe that something as momentous as this would have escaped the notice of both the U.S. military and the entire Iraqi government.”); [...]
12:52 am
Nikolay, you said But MOI is the only source that says that the story is a lie.
I don’t think that’s true. Didn’t the New York Times say they investigated the story but were unable to find witnesses? Ok, not quite the way I remembered it, but more or less the same. It’s here
(For its part, The New York Times took note of the incident on Saturday, in a larger story about the mosque burnings, this way: “In the evening, a resident named Imad al-Hashemi said in a telephone interview on Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, that gunmen had doused some people with gasoline and set them on fire. Other residents contacted by telephone denied this.â€)
Does that have any bearing on this to you?
6:05 am
I’m exasperated too. Sick of it entirely. Unnamed sources, photo manipulation- it’s a damn daily shelling. It’s a media war, and the media has their own horse in the race, hence the selective laziness when it comes to the checking of one’s facts.
Even the seemingly lone dissent to Mr. Moran’s original piece had his eyeballs fixed on yet another diversionary topic before (it seems) even digesting what was actually said in the original.
Back in college we’d call it “wetbrain”- the inability for one to remain focused on any issue long enough to see it thru. The distracted mind syndrome. Since this war began the mainstreem press has been in high gear to create this sort of mass-morasse of self-curtailed and tailored items of timing in order to keep the “wetbrains” looking at “the next” big ticket news item- rather than keeping their eye and focus on point- unless and only if that point were to undermine support for the war. And in particular this President.
I’m tired of not being able to trust the press. THEY, I dearly pray, are the ones who will wake up.
...not holdin’ mabreath tho. Great piece Rick- I feel ya.
12:48 pm
“Well, if somebody proves [the AP story is bogus], I would say that [the AP] are wrong to [print it]. ... I think, it’s really funny how blogosphere goes into overdrive over any such event, with all the judgments passed before any facts are presented.”
Nikolay, can’t you see the double standard here? I accept that you do not trust MOI (and probably not the MNF either), but what has the AP (or MSM in general) done to make you trust them so blindly that anything they claim was stated by an anonymous, untracable, unlocatable source is accepted despite the absense of any corroboration by MOI, MNF, NYT or any ancilary evidence (funerals, pictures, testimonies, speeches, reprisals, etc.). If you think the MOI (and possibly the MNF) are spouting propaganda why do you not believe the enemy is doing so as well? Since when has there been an obligation for anyone to disprove what is, to a critical eye, little more than a rank rumor, a proposition that is logically impossible, rather than an obligation by the reporting agent to prove its claims?
For your talk of jumping to conclusions before the facts are presented, the only conclusion I see being jumped to is that the facts in this specific case (like many others) are very sparse and misrepresented. The only facts we know from the AP story are that Iraq is experiencing sectarian violence, an anonymous source claiming to be associated with the IP claims the event happened. Other facts are that there is no physical evidence to corroborate the story, the NYT could not obtain independent reports (and in fact received denials) and both the IP and MNF claim the named source is not affiliated with the IP in any way. Unless there are other “facts” you know please explain why these should lead to the conclusion that the AP is right and the MOI/MNF are covering it up.
9:23 am
The decline of standards within the MSM will have tragic consequences. We who prefer the blogosphere cheer this sometimes, since we view the MSM as dinosaurs, and if they will assist in their own decline, then, great.
But they are still a NEWS SOURCE. Just as a physician should practice by the oath “Do No Harm”, any news source should always practice by the oath “Never Deceive”.
If a news source has a bias, they should proudly admit it. I believe bias is not a problem. You can be biased and still rigorously report the news, so long as you are careful to not deceive. But I am becoming more and more convinced that the AP and other MSM outlets are engaged in deliberate deceit.
There are Muslims who believe that deceiving the kaffir is perfectly acceptable under Islam, so long as their agenda (the spread of Islam) is the goal.
Deceit is always driven by an agenda.
I am convinced that most of the MSM have an agenda, and they are perfectly comfortable in the use of deceit to achieve the agenda.
They have a bias, but they claim to be objective – while knowing they are not objective; the DENIAL of bias, not the bias itself, is another deceit. The slanted coverage, the suppression of truths, the use of propaganda, the DEFENSE of that propaganda even when it is shown to be faulty or deceptive itself… these show us what they are really up to.
There was a time, not too many decades ago, when an industry practioner would have been horrified to be found to be violating industry standards. I suppose this was caused by Shame, which is being purged from Western Civilization. Nowadays, industry standards are given only lip service; and the standards are usually ignored, and the noble spirit behind them is even mocked.
Deceit, not bias, is the assassin of Truth. Our MSM are now openly deceitful.
7:51 pm
It’s Media’s War: “Anything for a Story”
If fair reporting and quality of journalism were mandatory today; we would see a greater power for addressing the unfairly imprisoned, and silenced; which span the globe. Rick Moran gives a to-the-heart explanation of the changing nature of journalis…
12:53 pm
Yes, AP should produce their Identified Source. It’s not like he’s a confidential informant or whatever. But as part of the MSM, AP is above mere accountability to the readers. You know them—the ones who have a “right to know.”
MSM Journalism has a generic problem—Journalism degrees. Back in the olden times, it seems, Reporters came up through the ranks (remember Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter?) from copy boy. Few print reporters had “degrees in journalism.” They didn’t exist. The few with degrees had English or something similar. Thing in MSM started going to heck in a handbasket when Journalists replaced Reporters. And colleges everywhere started Journalism degree programs (look! It’s like Liberal Arts except you don’t need a foreign language!)
MSM has a general credibility problem with me dating back to 1968. I was over in Vietnam serving with the Army during Tet. It wasn’t until I got back that I found out Uncle Walter Cronkite had declared us at a dead end/quagmired/whatever. I also remember rolling through Camp Schmidt, up in Pleiku, by the press camp (nice facility) where I never saw anyone. And finding out that when Journalists were killed in the field, it was normally a Chinese Nationalist or Japanese film crew member who was the lost journalist. The round-eyes stayed close to the bars an’ wimmin down in Saigon/Cholon. Some made obligatory forays out, but their reportage wasn’t any more accurate than the Five O’Clock Follies given at MACV.
11:09 am
[...] My two posts on the AP are here and here. I was wrong about Michelle Malkin debunking the possible problem with transliterating Arab names into English for as Allah posited at the time and points out here, that appears to have been the reason for the inability of the Iraqi Information Ministry and CENTCOM to track Hussein down. [...]