One of the criticsms – and there are many – of the ISG’s Report (Containing 79 Whole, Perfect and Un-Severable Recommendations to the President that Really Ought to be Read as Marching Instructions in Order to Save Him from His Own Folly in the Growing Morass that is Iraq) is that, apart from former Virginia governer (and ex-combat Marine Charles Robb) none of the group spent any of their little time in Iraq outside of the protected Green Zone.
That being true, one wonders whence came their special insight into the Coming Apocalypse that is Iraq?
Well, at least partly, one surmises, from the news media. You know: Reuters. The New York Times. The AP.
You’ve probably been hearing about the controversy surrounding the Associated Press’ story of the six Sunni worshippers in Iraq doused with kerosene by Shia death squads before being set aflame under the very eye of local police who did nothing to intervene. The solitary source of the initial story was one Iraqi police captain Jamil Hussein, who, as it turns out may neither be in the police, nor a captain and may not even be named Jamil Hussein. Curt over at Flopping Aces has made a cottage industry out of pointing out the story’s inconsistencies and flaws, while the AP has for the most part in return impugned his motives for daring to speak.
It turns out that this kind of reporting – and the vigorous push-back when questioned – is not particularly new for the AP. Witness their 1999 story of the massacre at No Gun Ri during the Korean War, as challenged by former army infantry officer turned historian and author Robert Bateman:
(T)he AP’s sensationalistic story painted it as a deliberate massacre, done with machine guns at extremely close range.
The most sensational account started in the 57th paragraph of the 3,448-word story, sourced to one Edward Daily. As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30 caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold blood at point-blank range.
Daily’s account was chilling. It was also – as AP should have known – a fantasy.
The AP story took at face value Daily’s claims that he was a combat infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished Cross and three Purple-Hearts.
In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun Ri.
When I later confronted AP editors with the facts and records that showed their source Daily to be a fraud, they blew me off. What would a historian know about this topic after all, or a soldier?
The AP didn’t issue a retraction, or even attempt to reinvestigate; and it certainly didn’t withdraw the story from the Pulitzer competition. Instead, it attacked the messenger.
This is interesting in a couple of different ways: Obviously the No Gun Ri story was over 50 years old when the AP broke their “scoop” about the massacre in 1999, so timeliness was not at stake in the way it can be for a competitive company whose livelihood depends upon getting the news out while it’s still, well: new. And while there are legitimate reasons for reporters to hunker down inside the Green Zone and rely upon local stringers (even if doing so requires of the reporter a certain degree of healthy scepticism on those stringers’ motivations and biases) such was clearly not the case in the No Gun Ri story.
It’d be tempting to maybe draw the conclusion that this kind of reporting draws the thorn of purported political bias from the AP’s paw – after all the No Gun Ri story broke when Bill Clinton was president. Tempting, but inconclusive of course: Bill Clinton was 4 years old when No Gun Ri happened, so it’d be hard for even the most rabid Clinton-basher to blame it on him.
No, I’m afraid that at least part of the reason why the search phrase “growing violence in Iraq” returns some 1.7 million hits is because of the age-old truth of journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” The press doesn’t make money reporting on new schoolhouses and hospitals, nor does it cover airplanes that land on time. They sell advertising by reporting bad news and mostly they don’t do it out of bias – although a little of that can go a long way – but rather because we ask them for it.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves…”–From Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
They would have been better off appointing a bunch of sharp 0-3s who are in country than a bunch of has-beens to develop this thing. just saying.
Well, there is nothing wrong with accurately reporting bad news. There is something wrong with making up a story about people burned alive in the streets out of whole cloth and then refusing to produce your source.
If the AP writes a story and nobody reads it, did it really happen?
This seems pretty conclusive proof that Americans are being played for suckers by the jihadist propaganda artists. That American news media outlets are so gullibly, indeed eagerly, their willing accomplices is sad and infuriating. I lost confidence in the accuracy of the mainstream media (several years ago) and rely on the blogosphere, Drudge, and Fox News as sources to consider. Meanwhile, most Americans, if they pay attention at all, absorb the agenda driven half-truths of the “elite media”, and respond accordingly when polled, providing more “proof” that P.T. Barnum was right. I only wonder that when (not if) a nuke destroys an American city, will the news media stick with their “blame America first” approach?