Don Surber is reminding us that the media has still not reported on The Smoking Gun’s find of al-Qaeda’s torture manual:
Not to be a one-trick pony about this, but two days have passed since the Smoking Gun broke the story and the major newspaper have yet to pick up on it.
The story:
MAY 24–In a recent raid on an al-Qaeda safe house in Iraq, U.S. military officials recovered an assortment of crude drawings depicting torture methods like “blowtorch to the skin” and “eye removal.” Along with the images, which you’ll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters.
Hmm. That seems newsworthy to me.
It sure does, but as Don points out, neither the NYT’s, The WaPo, nor the LAT’s have picked up the story. A story that shows:
Why should any of this be news? We all know the enemy we fight uses torture, that’s why the MSM yawns at the news while they try to dig up some Geneva Convention abuses by our own troops against an enemy that routinely disobeys the Geneva Convention. The left and the MSM cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that THIS is real torture, not putting women’s panties on top of someone’s head. THIS is news……
While the latest Rosie rant is not.
Lorie Byrd writes about the latest Rosie dustup and the fact that we need to continue to fight against the use of bald faced lies and conspiracy theories before they become so prevalent that they become the truth. Case in point the "600,000 Iraqi civilians killed" lie used by Rosie along with the twoofer madness:
I have previously written about how ABC has acted irresponsibly in letting O’Donnell spout ridiculous 9/11 conspiracy theories and other misleading and incorrect information to viewers of The View for quite a while now. Unfortunately, many in the media will not point out when untrue statements are made about Republicans. In fact, earlier in the same segment in which the now infamous showdown took place, co-host Joy Behar read a list of reasons President Bush should be impeached, including claiming that he “stole the election in 2000,” “killed the surplus with tax cuts” and “lied to us to get us into war.” It is up to conservatives to set the record straight any opportunity they get and regrettably most of them have been too silent for too long.
Myths are born when an untrue statement is repeated frequently enough, and loudly enough, that many come to believe the statement must be true because they have heard it said over and over again, usually with no refutation. For too long conservatives have allowed statements like Bush “stole the election” and “lied us into war” to be repeated with little if any opposition. When outrageous statements are first made it often seems unnecessary to bother refuting claims that are demonstrably untrue. That was the case with the kooky 9/11 “truther” claims that floated around the internet. The claims that the US government played a role in the 9/11 attacks were treated by most as something only tinfoil hat-wearing Bush haters could possibly believe and most (including me) chose not to dignify them by bothering to respond. Popular Mechanics debunked the various 9/11 conspiracy theories in book form, after all, and to most (again including me) it seemed unnecessary to bother pointing out something so obvious.
The truthers did not stop though. They continued to spread the 9/11 conspiracy theories and even enlisted the support of celebrities like Charlie Sheen and Rosie O’Donnell. What has been the result? Recent polls show that “Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know and 26% are not sure." The lesson we should learn from this is that any inaccurate claim that is made, regardless of how outrageous or seemingly unbelievable, must be vigorously refuted as loudly and frequently as possible, getting all available facts into the public arena so that such unfounded theories are not allowed to take hold in the first place. Conservatives cannot depend on those in the media to do this. Too often reporters simply give public figures a microphone to say anything they please, not offering any fact-checking whatsoever.
In the bygone era reporters used to do some fact-checking. Now they use any Jamil Hussein they can find to prove a point they want to make instead of reporting the news.
This is something we need to fight everyday. We need to demand that the MSM pay attention to stories that NEED attention, such as the al-Qaeda torture manual, while demanding they take out the bias and just report the damn facts
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