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HEADLESS BODIES IN FACTLESS RAG
March 27 item in the New York Times:
The bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.
Oh, really? The Mudville Gazette begs to differ.
And how many ‘reports’ of headless bodies end up getting re-reported later, bumping up the civilian body count?
That’s some goddawful fact-checking from the NYTimes, guess they figure, “Hey, it’s war time, whose gonna notice?” The Mudville will notice!
Interesting note on Mudville about the way the insurgents are able to get their stories and photos out into the newsosphere minutes after a battle or attack, and the official Military media reps can take hours or days to get out their info on the same incidents. So by the time the US Military version hits the media, the corrections are always going to be buried. That’s the instant news age, right or wrong.
So, I’m presuming here, the insurgents release a story to their media contacts or their own Arabic websites, it gets onto local Iraqi and Middle East websites, goes up the chain of more and more ‘serious’ news sites, until some flacker at the NYTimes sees the story, Googles around, sees it’s already been reported on dozens of other ‘news’ sites and thinks, “Hey, it must be true,” flacker cannot get official confirmation or denial from the Military media reps, so NYTimes flacker runs with what is basically insurgent propaganda, unchecked, unsourced.
Maybe that’s wrong, dunno, but it certainly seems a realistic scenario. Or not?
BTW, April 9 is IRAQ LIBERATION DAY.
Any events planned anywhere?
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 04 04 at 10:11 AM • permalinkSpeaking of Headless. By damn, it has two strikes against it...it’s a friggin’ statue, too....more god damn fatwas...shit.
Mudville also notes towards the bottom of that posting that the Times sort of “corrected” its earlier eye-catching headline. The 30 headless bodies, it turns out, was an “Urban Myth” worthy of inclusion/derision in Snopes. But, of course, that admission was buried at the bottom of a long story having nothing to do with the 30 bodies and printed on page 0ne-hundred something of an inside section of the paper.
Another fine reporting job from the newspaper that was.
Sick one about ‘headless’...
Bad motorcycle wreck (stop me if you’ve heard this, oh yeah, you can’t....lol).
Anyway, this good old boy gets decapped, highway police scour the area looking for anyone that may know this poor dead soul.
As luck would have it, a fellow comes driving up in a pick up truck, the patrolmen stop him, fellow says that looks like a friends motorcycle.
Patrolmen get him out of the truck warning him that this is a pretty gruesome scene, he walks forward and a patrolman picks up the head, holds it at his shoulder height and asks...Do you know him?
The good fellow says...Yeah, it looks like Fred....BUT I don’t recall him being that short.
Hey, it’s a joke, gimme’ a break.
Hey, it’s the New York Times! Who’s gonna question The Gray Lady™?
/sarcasm
LLL, your scenario sounds about right. The official press releases do get fact checked, plus there’s always a certain amount of bureaucracy involved in the system (translation: everyone in the chain has to touch the story to make sure it’s just right; not 100% true, but enough to slow the system).
Lies and distortions get passed around faster. Who woulda thunk it?
Getting the word out faster would help, but if the NYT is going to print what amounts to urban legends without a simple phone call to MNF-I or MNC-I, there ain’t much anyone can do.
Except maybe put a bar in the press room on Camp Victory.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 04 04 at 11:26 AM • permalinkFacinating update:
BAQOUBA, Iraq — More than a dozen insurgents suspected in the mass killing of 18 Shiites last week were arrested or killed Friday after U.S. and Iraqi army soldiers spent several hours chasing them through the rural farmland north of Baghdad.
The insurgents were spotted Friday in the flat and lawless area known to U.S. soldiers as “Road Warrior land,” which runs along a historic dividing line between the mostly Shiite areas of northwestern Baghdad and the Sunni villages of Diyala province.
Iraqi soldiers began chasing the team of insurgents after finding them loaded into seven cars roaming a main road and trying to hijack a cement truck early Friday afternoon.
Road Warrior land? Hijack a cement truck? WTF?
Is al-Zarqawi the Humongous?
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2006 04 04 at 11:55 AM • permalinkJeffs, thanks for the info. It sounds like a hell of a problem, particularly when journos can sit in a briefing room wating for a US Army conference to start, and be reading Al Q dispatches posted online on their Blackberries and filing stories before the conference even begins. What a nightmare.
That mosque ‘massacre’ was probably a good example. By the time someone senior from the US Mil got in front of the cameras to say what happened, the TV news had been running the Shiite locals version for more than 24 hours.
But the old rule applies, I suppose. He who gets in first, gets the headline. The true story winds up buried at the end of a story on page 17 a day or two later.
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 04 04 at 12:41 PM • permalinkYeah, Texas Bob! Stick it in the Water Palace, or maybe one of the other mansions around that lake. Might have to fish a few drunks out of the water now and then, but, hey, anything for the troops, eh? Send General Order #1 into oblivion......
It occurs to me, what a great place the Water Palace would be for a party. Maybe the Iraqi government should consider a convention center there, once those terrorist a**holes are put away, no? What a great source of income! Especially when the units start having their 20 year reunions, no?
LLL—yup, the old rule applies. Sadly so.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 04 04 at 01:06 PM • permalinkSpiny—the terrorists like to use concrete trucks for vehicle borne IEDs. There’s a lot of construction in Baghdad, and you can pack a lot of explosives into the cylinder. Not to mention the shrapnel effect. That attack on the journalist compound last year involved a concrete truck, as I recall. It’s quite a serious matter, and I’m glad those terrorists were intercepted.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2006 04 04 at 01:09 PM • permalinkWasn’t a cement truck used for the UN compound bombing?
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 04 04 at 02:52 PM • permalinkWhat!!! The NYT-ERROR-IST has made another journalistic “blunder” aimed at undermining Coalition efforts in Iraq and libeling Bush. (Yawn). Better than committing a treasonous act. (See Schoenfeld’s article, pgs 23-32 of March ‘06 Commentary documenting NYT’s violation of the Espionage Act in releasing secret information on the monitoring of Terrorist phone calls overseas from the USA.)
A summary of all the NYT false reporting would fill dozens of posts.Here are some (not nearly all) bush bashing “blunders” over the last ten months: 3/14/06,In a brief, unsigned article buried deep within the newspaper today, the New York Times admitted that a major “scoop” in the newspaper on Saturday may have been nothing more than a load of ca-ca. The front-page article, by the Times’s house terrorism apologist Hassan Fattah, told the grisly tale of the poor feller who was photographed in a black hood at Abu Gharib. However, Salon last night found that the Times had the wrong guy—and, as the Times did not point out, that his story had big holes.
3/23/06:NYT falls for another fraud which ties in with another of the Times’ favorite opportunities to bash the Bush administration--Hurricane Katrina! From Corrections section:An article in The Metro Section on March 8 profiled Donna Fenton, identifying her as a 37-year-old victim of Hurricane Katrina who had fled Biloxi, Miss., and who was frustrated in efforts to get federal aid as she and her children remained as emergency residents of a hotel in Queens.Yesterday, the New York police arrested Ms. Fenton.... Prosecutors in Brooklyn say she was not a Katrina victim, never lived in Biloxi and had improperly received thousands of dollars in government aid. 12/4/05. NYT runs bogus story on eve of Iraqui election about voter ballots being smuggled into Iran to try to upset election.
On 6/ 6/05, the New York Times’ acknowledged that one of its editors had inserted false information into an op-ed that ran that day in some editions.
The NYT also specializes in suppression of the news, distortion, outright propaganda in favor of enemies of the USA. Only one example of each to save space:
Suppression:Nov. 6 The NYT laughably reports on the Muslim riots in France without ever indicating that the rioters are Muslim. (The NYT suppression of news of the Holocaust is well-known. For those doubters research retarded google it)
Distortion:The NYT’s selective editing disgrace reaches the pages of the New York Post: “The family of a Marine killed in Iraq slammed The New York Times yesterday for selectively excerpting a letter he wrote predicting his own death, while the paper scandalously ignored a long passage in which he praised America’’s mission..."I (uncle)wrote to the Times and said it would be proper to honor Jeff by completing the story. They never responded."”(Apparently, the NYT received so many complaints that the NYT public editor, whose job it is to oversee and correct such outrages, released a form e_mail which attempted to justify the false reporting on the basis that it was OK to distort Cpl. Starr’’s message because the paper did likewise to other letters it quoted. )
Propoganda for enemies of the USA.:The support of the NYT (articles by Herbert Mathews) for Castro is documented in a book that is just about out or is out by Anthony DePalma in which he states that ““Matthews called Castro a defender of the Cuban Constitution , a lover of democracy and a friend of the American people.”” He notes that ““The image created by Matthews stuck, helping Castro consolidate his power and gain international recognition. US attitudes toward the conflict in Cuba changed, dooming Batista.””
Just the tip of the iceberg.Although many of us have noted that MediaWatch seems to have improved, who thinks that this item will make an appearance any time soon?
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 04 04 at 05:46 PM • permalink#18, good point Ms Maid, send a mention or note in to their ‘tips’ site, or e-mail address, I’ll do the same, a few others, too, and see if they pick it up. I’m sure this got picked up in the Australian media, the outright fabrication part I mean.
Media Watch does seem better, that woman on there is actually kinda funny sometimes, at last.
Posted by LeftieLatteLover on 2006 04 04 at 06:12 PM • permalinkThere’s something many folk seem to have either missed or forgotten.
The NYT and other forms of the MSM were in Iraq prior to OIF. They were assigned politically reliable “watchers” by the Saddamite regime.
After the fall of Bagcity, these same organizations made the decision to keep these ‘watchers’ and re designate them as indig sources and news fetchers.
These are Iraqis known to have been reliable to the murder/death cult that existed prior to liberation and can be counted on to remain loyal to whomever is out and about killing Americans and other Coalition forces.
The NYT and others of the idiocracy have made a conscious decision to employ as their only source of “news” those that are overtly loyal to the enemy.
These organizations may have “reporters” in country but these “journalists” dont leave the compounds where they feel safest. Their hatred and mistrust of all things US and military preclude them from accompanying our Soldiers on patrols.
They rely, almost exclusively on these ‘stringers’ in their employ to feed them ‘news’ from ‘the street’.
NYT and other ‘journalism’ outfits have admitted to doing this.
In effect the NYT is in league with those described by Iraq The Model as trying to stamp out the free press in Iraq.
If the west is to survive it will need to get rid of such white ants.
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I read this linked via Instapundit last night. Baquoba was the next big city just to the south of our AO and we occasionally raided out of sector in the desert to the north of the city. Kind of a wild area in that the unit that worked out of LSA Anaconda was tied to the city so the bad guys took to the hinterlands. We never made a big catch or got into a big fight when we raided there, but we disrupted their operations.