More Fine Distinctions From the Drive-By Media
Dafydd ab Hugh
Take a look at this Reuters headline and see if the same thing catches your eye as caught mine:
U.S.-led raid, suicide bomber kill at least 12 Afghans
My first thought was, whose brilliant idea was it to allow suicide bombers to embed with American military forces? But somehow, that didn't seem to be very plausible. Scratching my brain, I read the lede graf (note the cool journalistic buzz words I incorrectly lumped together):
U.S.-led troops killed at least four people, including a teenage girl, in a raid in southeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday and a suicide bomber killed eight more in the south, residents, officials and coalition forces said.
And at last -- I'm kind of slow, as by now you must have observed -- I realized that what was going on here was that Reuters had casually conflated deaths from an American attack on Taliban militants with deaths caused by a suicide bomber five provinces away. (Evidently, I'm not the only one incorrectly lumping things together.)
Suppose the cops in St. Louis had shot a suspect on September 11th, 2001. I suppose Reuters would then have written, "Metro Police, hijackers kill nearly 3000."
Reading deeper, it appears that once again, we have a conflict of witnesses:
[...]
Once again, the claims of completely anonymous, unknown "witnesses," who could be anybody (including conspirators with the targets of the raid), are thoughtlessly placed on the same level of trust as the official statement from a known military spokesman, who is easily contacted for follow-up information or evidence. "Hey, it's he-said, she-said, folks. We can't pick a side -- we're journalists!"
This happens all the time, and it's a major reason why the American people are under the false impression that nothing good is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan: the elite media will take the word of anybody, even known prevaricators like Green Helmet Guy -- even entirely ficticious police lieutenants -- so long as said "anybody" is willing to accuse American forces of indiscriminate, reckless slaughter, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.
If Fang the Wonder Dog barked out an accusation, Reuters would run with it. ...
Jamilgate: What happened to the morgue?
Allahpundit
Got an interesting tip from a sharp-eyed reader this morning. A few days after Thanksgiving, back when Jamilgate was just starting to break, AP International Editor John Daniszewski issued a statement promising that a new, more complete article on the burning six was forthcoming. Included in the statement:
AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and neighborhood residents and corroborated it with a named police spokesmen and also through hospital and morgue workers.
The new article hit the wires the next day. Quote:
One witness said he and other people from the neighborhood took the six immolation victims to the Sunni cemetery near Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib suburb and buried them after the gunbattle. That witness said one of the victims was the Mustafa mosque muezzin or prayer caller, Ahmed al-Mashadani. He did not know the names of the five others, but said they were all members of the al-Mashadani tribe.
Query: what happened to the hospital and morgue workers? That paragraph strongly implies that the locals took the corpses directly to the graveyard and the article doesn’t so much as mention a hospital or a morgue. How did the AP corroborate the story with workers at those locations if, presumably, they never even saw the bodies? ...
Eason Jordan is back
Michelle Malkin
Well, this should be interesting. I'm sure bloggers will be checking in to see what defamatory statements and rumors former CNN head Eason Jordan will be posting on his new website, Iraqslogger:
For the past four years there has been no shortage of news and views on Iraq and the long-running war there. What’s been missing: a one-stop-shopping clearinghouse for nonpartisan information, including material coming out of Iraq itself from natives of that country, not from foreign correspondents.
Now that need is finally being addressed in the form of IraqSlogger, in Beta at www.iraqslogger.com, but due to be officially launched next week. Its director is the former CNN news division chief, Eason Jordan, who quit that post suddenly in 2005 after 23 years with the company. ...
Here's a question for you, Eason:
Who is Jamil Hussein?
