To catch up on the whole saga of Capt. Jamil Hussein, the Capt that is not a Capt, the man that no one can find or proves exists and the source of over 61 stories that the AP has written about Iraq, click here and I have it all on one page.
Confederate Yankee has done what he calls the "Grunt work" of trying to verify any of the 61 stories and I think his results will surprise quite a few denial based individuals.
As Hot Air says:
You want the real bombshell today? Go read Bob Owens’s systematic googling of 40 other stories sourced to Jamil Hussein. Turns out there’s not much independent corroboration of those either. How much? Best as he can tell — zero. Didn’t anyone at the AP notice that at the time, he wonders. Or did they just not care?
IraqSlogger rightly points out that the AP will suffer until it does what is right.
Personally I believe that since WE are the readers of these articles and AP refuses to correct their mistakes, their lies or their faulty information, it is up to US to make, not only our voices, but our displeasure known.
To that end, we must stop linking to their stories, if it is a credible story, others sources will have it for us to link to.
If it is to make a point about an issue of credibility in one of their stories, quote the whole story verbatum but DO NOT LINK TO IT, not on the AP site.
Other papers use their stories, we can link to those to make our points, so the story will still be seen for our purposes but NOT ON AP's SITE.
If you want your voices heard, it is not only what you say, it is what you deliberately do NOT link to. Like any other site online, AP has advertisements that pay-per-clicks pay them for, ads that trackback to them and make them money. They DEPEND on us, the readers.... why do we keep linking to them?
Do the numbers, for every one of us that link directly to them, our readers follow those links and visit the AP site. Quite a few, such as Malkin, Power Line, Hot Air and quite a few others have a very large readership....we are talking about millions of hits to their site just from bloggers.
Does anyone doubt that a fall off of say 1,000,000 hits in a day will be noticed by the AP?
We can bitch and moan all we want about the AP, but it will do no good unless we actively DO something about it.
Others discussing this:
Winds of Change, Ace of Spades, Blue Crab Boulevard, WizBang, Prairie Pundit, RedState, Jules Crittenden, Strata-Sphere, Flopping Aces (who originally brought this story to light), The Jawa Report, Townhall, Bill's Bites, A Blog for All, Power Line, Don Surber.
Keep up with the discussions here.
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