The ever talented Jamil Hussein has been hard to find in the news lately. The AP has yet to produce him nor have they used him as a source for any reporting. But the AP is up to its old tricks once again. This time using two on the suspect list for stories today.
Both reports have headlines about the number of US casualties today. The first one:
In other violence Wednesday, two mortar rounds landed and exploded in a secondhand goods market in a mixed Shiite-Sunni area in central Baghdad, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens, said police officers Ali Mutab and Mohammed Khayoun, who provided the casualty totals.
About 25 minutes later, a suicide bomber on a bus in Sadr City detonated explosives hidden in his clothing, killing two people and wounding 15, police 1st Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.
10 dead, dozens wounded, and who is the sources for those totals? Two men suspected of being frauds.
Then they print this:
A total of at least 75 people were killed or found dead across Iraq on Wednesday, including 48 whose bullet-riddled bodies were found in different parts of the capital.
Really? Where did they get that figure? Did they see these bodies? Any evidence at all or were these bodies quickly buried also?
Then we have this story in which they write about the same incidents but add one more source:
In other violence Wednesday, two mortar rounds landed and exploded in a secondhand goods market in a mixed Shiite-Sunni area in central Baghdad, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens, said police officers Ali Mutab and Mohammed Khayoun, who provided the casualty totals. About 25 minutes later, a suicide bomber on a bus in Sadr City detonated explosives hidden in his clothing, killing two people and wounding 15, police 1st Lt. Thaer Mahmoud said.
This story mentions a school killing using the ever popular anonymous source:
Gunmen also broke into a school in western Baghdad, killing its Sunni headmaster in his office, then instructing teachers not to return, an Iraqi army officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.
And in this one we have Mr. Ali reappearing:
In the worst attack, police Col. Bassim Mudim Abdullah and two of his guards were killed in a drive-by shooting at about 10:30 a.m. near al-Shaab Stadium in eastern Baghdad, police Lt. Bilal Ali said. The colonel was deputy chief of police in the central Saadoun district.
The gunmen were wearing civilian clothes and were in a private car, Majid said.
So while Jamil Hussein has disappeared it is becoming apparent that a few of his fellow "police officers" have taken over his duties providing suspect information.
Way to go AP! Your making us all proud…..
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*heavy sigh*
For most of my adult life, I have viewed the news with a jaundiced eye, suspecting the insertion of editorial bias through a careful choosing of which facts were important and which not and which words should be used to describe a situation. The assumption was always there, somewhere in the background shadows, that the facts themselves were at least accurate, or as accurate as the situation allowed, especially when attributed by a dispassionate official from law enforcement or military.
Now I have begun to look at even the facts cross-eyed. Pictures lie, stringers lie, video lies and now wire services lie. The machinery of fact gathering has become broken, but instead of producing faulty information that is readily identifiable, it produces perfect-looking information that is false.
I think it’s great that you are working so hard to “out” these “sources”. I wait daily for the MSM to admit to their propaganda and begin to actually report the truth. I won’t hold my breath.
Any chance someone could bother a CENTCOM public affairs type to see if any of these reports are real? It would be great to have a scoreboard of reported deaths by AP and show how many of those reports are false.
There are sites out there that gather media stats for deaths and tally them over the months as some kind of progress indicator. One such page is this one at iCasualties.org.
It seems to me that CENTCOM could be well served putting a public affairs person to work looking at these reports and debunking them quickly when they are false.
Immolate: I feel the same way about it as you do. If the “news” media simply reported the facts and worked equally hard to verify both negative and positive stories (that is if they bothered to report any positive stories) we might not have these feelings.
The CBS National Guard documents story was a perfect example. CBS didn’t try very hard to verify the documents authenticity because they wanted them to be real. It fit their bias and prejudices regarding Bush.
The sad part about all this is that even with the weakening of the lamestream media monopoly, they still have this incredible power to send half baked stories screaming onto the front pages of “news” papers and airwaves all over the world.
Getting The News From The Enemy, Update V
Courtesy of Flopping Aces:
The ever talented Jamil Hussein has been hard to find in the news lately. The AP has yet to produce him nor have they used him as a source for any reporting. But the AP is up to its old tricks once again. This time using…