(Part 8 -- Continued from this post.)

N.Y. Times Smugly Analyzes the Jamil Hussein Controversy
Patterico

The Jamil Hussein saga has finally hit the pages of the New York Times. And what a smug, circle-the-wagons piece it is, too.

Read it all to get the full flavor, but for now, this morsel of Big Media arrogance accurately captures the attitude:

It is also true that the institution conducting America’s multibillion gamble in Iraq — the military — says that this standout of atrocities never happened, while a venerable, trusted news agency has twice interviewed witnesses who said, in extensive, vivid detail, that it did.

Note the differing descriptions of the two sides. Is there any doubt in your mind where the author of the piece comes down?

Of course, the witnesses are unnamed. But there is a “venerable, trusted news agency” behind their anonymous assertions, so rest easy. ...

***

Who Is Qais al-Bashir?
Curt (Flopping Aces)

[Just go read it. Bigger things started breaking before I had time to link to it.]

***

Responding To The New York Times
Curt (Flopping Aces)

The New York Times has a new article out tomorrow in which they skewer blogs for having the audacity to question them:

For bloggers who believe that the media has been drawing false pictures of mayhem in Iraq, the insistence of the American military and Iraqi officials that the burning incident appeared to be a mere rumor was proof that their suspicions were correct.

“Getting the News From the Enemy” was how the Flopping Aces blog (floppingaces.net) tracked the developing face-off between the military and A.P.

Iraq’s interior ministry wielded the article like a bludgeon and used it as an opportunity to create a press monitoring unit that suggested, in no uncertain terms, that reporters in Baghdad should come to its press officers for “real, true news.” A ministry spokesman promised “legal action” — whatever that might mean — against journalists who publish information the agency deemed wrong.

That may seem patently absurd.

Now that my friends is called spin.  The Iraqi's set up a unit so that the press could be assured that the official spokesmen that these reporters like to quote so much are in fact who they say they are.  What's absurd is the notion that this wrong and somehow restricting their freedoms.  Is it too much to ask that the media quote REAL police officers? ...

***

The alleged war atrocity that the NYTimes can't substantiate
Michelle Malkin

The controversy over the Associated Press' coverage of the alleged burning of six burning Sunnis in Hurriya, Iraq last month continues--even if most of the media refuses to confront it.

This morning, the New York Times' Tom Zeller--one of the few on the case--follows up his blog coverage with an article that calls for separating "hyperbole from horror." Unfortunately, Zeller's article doesn't succeed at doing so--and has left the impression that he is, as Lucianne.com writes, "sneering at the blogosphere."

Zeller does knock the AP for its paranoid, hyperbolic reaction to the blogger challenge:

Then there was The Associated Press itself, which by Friday had come to view the continued scrutiny of its article as evidence that everyone — the military, the blogosphere, even other media outlets tracking the back-and-forth — was either agenda-driven, insolent, or both, but not legitimately curious.

And most importantly, he does not accept the AP's word that the incident at Hurriya occurred:

It is important to find out if this really happened in order to separate the hyperbole from the merely horrible in Iraq, so that the horrible will still have meaning. Otherwise it will all become din.

Left out of the article, as Allah notes, is Zeller's discovery that the NYTimes reporter in Iraq could not substantiate the story. Zeller published the little-noticed e-mail he received from Times reporter Ed Wong on his blog last week:

Hi Tom,

You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.

Best,
Ed Wong

Allah asks: ...

***

Part 8 of a series. Part 9.