In a follow up to About time Somebody Called Their Hand, Liberals Would Rather Hear Lies than Truth, Reporters Source in Iraq Proven False, Enemy Propaganda from our Media, Putting the Brakes on the Media Spreading Propaganda, Enemy Propaganda Update.
We now have a NYT piece defending the AP and their faulty reporting methods of using rumor as news. You can catch up on what everyone is saying over at Flopping Aces, where Curt responds to the NYT piece and Michelle Malkin where she points out via Hot Air that the Times neglects to include an email from a Times reporter, Ed Wong.
Please notice that the NYT piece and the page that has the email from Wong are BOTH from Tom Zeller. So it cannot be claimed that Zeller wasn't aware of this email, he deliberately left it out of the article in question!!!
Ed was unable to substantiate the burning incident for his Saturday story. Here’s how he described his reporting on that day, in an e-mail to us this afternoon:
Hi Tom,Why would Zeller leave this out? One reason, because it does not support his ridiculous article.
You ask me about what our own reporting shows about this incident. When we first heard of the event on Nov. 24, through the A.P. story and a man named Imad al-Hashemi talking about it on television, we had our Iraqi reporters make calls to people in the Hurriya neighborhood. Because of the curfew that day, everything had to be done by phone. We reached several people who told us about the mosque attacks, but said they had heard nothing of Sunni worshippers being burned alive. Any big news event travels quickly by word of mouth through Baghdad, aided by the enormous proliferation of cell phones here. Such an incident would have been so abominable that a great many of the residents in Hurriya, as well as in other Sunni Arab districts, would have been in an uproar over it. Hard-line Sunni Arab organizations such as the Muslim Scholars Association or the Iraqi Islamic Party would almost certainly have appeared on television that day or the next to denounce this specific incident. Iraqi clerics and politicians are not shy about doing this. Yet, as far as I know, there was no widespread talk of the incident. So I mentioned it only in passing in my report.
Best,
Edward Wong
As Hot Air points out:
That’s where Zeller got the background for the paragraph in tonight’s article. Why didn’t he specify that the Times’s own Baghdad correspondent has reason to doubt the AP report? Probably for the same reason he didn’t note that the AP’s new witnesses to the burning were all anonymous or that the agency hasn’t disputed Centcom’s assertion that its initial report about four mosques being burned was wrong: because that would have screwed with his theme of “rag[ing]” bloggers and Bush’s keystone kops military assailing the “venerable, trusted” Associated Press.
Now, if it were just this one story, then perhaps this whole thing would be over, but Jamil has been a source of many stories for the AP and now it seems that the AP makes a nasty habit of using sources that have been specifically marked by Centcom as unverifiable and unreliable sources.
After the attention that this is starting to get, the AP might want to start "verifying" their stories.
Others all over this:
OTB.
Little Green Footballs.
Blue Crab Boulevard.
The Jawa Report.
Boston Herald.
Patterico.
Tracked back by:
Smug Coverage from A Blog For All...
