Making (Up) The News

I've long complained about media in Iraq who stay huddled in their Green Zone hotels and depend on local stringers to bring them stories--stories that are accepted as gospel on the six o'clock news, yet are often whole-cloth fiction provided to the reporters by those with, to be kind, questionable motivations and agendas.

Remember those six Sunnis purportedly burned alive last week? They don't appear to exist. That Ramadi airstrike? It never happened. That recent raid by US troops a couple of weeks ago that killed two dozen women and children, where they indiscriminately burned down houses? No US troops were even in that area at the time.

Democracy Project has a little list, and a very relevant question:

The latest instances were unearthed by citizen bloggers, operating with only their keyboard. The key question that arises, then, is why the major media with all their vast resources could not or would not vet their own stories?

With links to bigger lists and in-depth examinations with specifics, including finding that one of the LA Times' prime sources does not seem to even exist, certainly not in the position he's claimed to be in. In the meantime, you haven't seen stories like this getting talking-head time, have you?

It's called MAKING UP the news, folks, and sadly, much of the Iraq reporting you see is just that--made up.

UPDATE: I missed Gateway Pundit piling on. And Michelle Malkin has done all the linking to other blog sources and details so I don't have to--just follow through the chains. But do see below about the other named "witness." That's showing here first. Dan Riehl looks to have caught that angle late last night, but I'm happy to be an also-ran and spread the word. And Curt at Flopping Aces and Say Anything blog is all over the whole thing, in-depth.

UPDATE: Gateway Pundit keeps asking the painful questions, and watching AP's Ra^ther huffy and tortured responses. He's also done the heavy lifting with the reference links on the second "eyewitness" that I was too time-challenged to add in yesterday. It was my bad to skip 'em, but life rudely interfered.

MORE below the fold!

UPDATE: The original "four bombed mosques" has mysteriously reduced to one in AP's stories, without any correction or explanation. The mosque in question was "attacked" in 2003 as well, though it looks like that "attack" was actually a bomb-making accident--nice folks. Remind me not to attend services there. The imam of that mosque has been accused of having been one of Saddam's secret police.

The other named witness in the AP accounts, Imad al-Din al-Hashemi, is cited variously as an "elder" of Hurriya, a "resident," and as a "university professor visiting Baghdad." In a TIME magazine story from November 3rd, he pops up in another story as "a Baghdad pediatrician" with a rabid "America spitting in our eyes" quote. So does he live there, or is he just visiting? University professor, pediatrician, Hurriya elder, Indian chief, or what? Do elders live elsewhere and only stop by to visit? Heh. His accounting of the dead varies from 12 to 14 to 18 as the story progresses. Heh.

When interviewed by Reuters, al-Hashemi said they evacuated the wounded as soon as the attack moved on to other mosques--those mysterious disappearing ones, I guess--and does not say ONE WORD about burning Sunnis. But by the time he gave a phone interview to al-Jazeera, he's saying he was eyewitness to the attackers dragging the six out of the mosque and burning them in front of his eyes, while (purportedly--does not appear until his NEW account) Iraqi security forces watch and do nothing. Double heh.

MORE UPDATE: It's been reported that al-Hashemi has recanted his story of seeing Sunnis burned. AP's "confirmation" defense justifying the original four-mosques-attacked and six-burning-Sunnis story cites two unnamed reporters who in turn cite unnamed anonymous "eyewitnesses" allegedly found many days afetr the fact.

MORE UPDATE:Word is out that the Iraqi government will officially confirm today that the much-quoted "police captain" Jamil Hussein, is not. We still don't know if he's an imposter, or even actually exists. It's noteworthy that the many stories of the last few months in which he's been used as the primary quoted source involve attacks all over the city of Baghdad, which is not a small place, yet he's supposed to be a precinct captain in one small part of the city--which is over five miles from where the mosque attack is reported to have occured. Triple heh.

Mary Katherine Ham at Townhall.com has a roundup of the initial expansion of the story. AP has issued a "confirmation" of having checked with "police captain" Jamil Hussein, whom no one else seems able to find, his not being on the rolls of the authorities as such.

ONCE AGAIN: Much if not most of the reporting from Iraq comes from Western "reporters" in Green Zone hotels re-writing and forwarding "stories" (emphasis on that word) given them by stringers and sources of dubious origin and motive, without ever actually checking the offered accounts for even basic veracity. They're being blatantly "played" by the factions, and seem to enjoy the process.

Lastly, if you don't read Chris Muir's excellent webtoon Day by Day which is just now beginning to get hardpaper syndication, you really should. It's good.