Smug Coverage

Tom Zeller, writing for the Business section of the Times, questions the AP and its continued insistence on the accuracy and veracity of stories provided to it by one Jamil Hussein but can't help but take unnecessary swipes at the bloggers who raised questions about the accuracy and veracity of the AP reporting:

For all of the grisly detail, a spokesman for the Iraq interior ministry, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, continued on Thursday to call the incident a rumor.

“We dispatched our forces to the area where the rumor claimed the burning took place and found nothing,” he said.

Meanwhile, little in the way of fallout over the event itself has been detected — no outcry, no heated, televised denunciations from Sunni clerics and politicians — as might be expected from what The Associated Press itself called “one of the most horrific alleged attacks of Iraq’s sectarian war.”

And so questions lingered and the blogs raged on.

The executive editor of The Associated Press, Kathleen Carroll, in a meeting in her office Friday afternoon, explained that the agency had already done all it could to respond to the uncertainties by vigorously re-reporting the article, and suggested that to engage these questions — to continue to write about them — merely fueled a mad blog rabble that would never be satisfied.

That is one way of looking at it. And there are certainly much larger issues to consider in Iraq.

True, the violence in Iraq is pervasive and focused largely on Baghdad. However, perceptions of the situation in Iraq are shaded by shoddy and inaccurate coverage, not to mention news reports that read like al Qaeda or insurgent media releases. If sensationalized and fictionalized accountings of events are provided by wire reports that cite to individuals that may not even exist, one has to wonder what factor that has on support for the US operations in Iraq. It also appears that the media coverage is biased in one direction - against the US operations in Iraq. That can't be merely coincidence or happenstance.

There is one way to deal with the Jamil Hussein question - provide him to reporters for an interview. Responsible bloggers will provide links citing references and support for their arguments. The least the AP can do is do the same.

The thing is, the NYT did investigate the matter further. Zeller even noted this in his blog at the NYT website. One of their reporters in Iraq couldn't verify key details of the incident and noted that if such an incident had occurred, the local imams and others would have taken to the streets.

Zeller, like the AP, thinks that bloggers have some nefarious purpose in seeking out the answers to basic questions on this incident. The thing is - the bloggers are the ones asking the basic journalistic questions that their own reporters and editorial staff should be asking. Can we verify this information beyond the use of anonymous sources. Can we actually get someone other than AP to find this guy Hussein and why is it that the MOI and the MNF-I say he doesn't exist and that the incident he described did not occur?

You would think that the AP would want to get to the bottom of the incident and weed out bogus stories since it is the reputation of the AP as a news source at stake. That, however, turns out to be wishful thinking as the AP's editorial staff thinks the criticism and demands for more transparency on who Hussein is and the chain of information are a witchhunt by bloggers paid by consulting groups in the employ of the Pentagon.

Curt at Flopping Aces, who got the ball rolling in the first place by noting various discrepancies in the AP stories relying upon Jamil Hussein, has much more. Put plainly, the AP continues to spin, bob, and weave, over the very existence of Captain Jamil Hussein. They claim he exists, and even had a reporter say that they visited him and Hussein himself says he exists.

The problem is that no one else has managed to visit him. He is apparently quite accessible to AP, but wont talk with anyone else. Therein lies the problem. The AP has a big problem on its hands if its reporters are playing fast and loose with the facts - including inventing sources. And Jamil Hussein isn't the only source that appears fishy.

Others blogging: Patterico, Charles at LGF, and Blue Crab Boulevard.

UPDATE:
Circling the wagons. That's a great way to describe how the Times and AP are dealing with the situation. Cheat Seeking Missiles uses that term to great effect. So does Bizzyblog, who also points out that Ray Robison found strange signs that AP was sharing reporters and/or sources with al Jazeera.

Others blogging: Bill's Bites, and Wake Up America.

Technorati: fauxtography, jamil hussein, fauxtography, journalism.